High Life
Directed by Claire Denis
- science fiction
- drama
- mystery
The story
Monte and his daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to deep space. The crew—death-row inmates led by a doctor with sinister motives—has vanished. As the mystery of what happened onboard the ship is unraveled, father and daughter must rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole.
What it’s like
Dim, sooty interiors lit by small pools of cold practical light, with long unbroken takes that let a spacecraft's rust-brown corridors, worn fabrics and humming machinery sit in the frame until they feel like rooms you have lived in. Claire Denis favours slow, drifting camera movement and an abstract, bodily stillness: the stars outside are smears of deep black, and the ship's hush is broken only by thuds, clanks and a restrained electronic drone that swells and recedes like breath. The vibe is bleak, austere and quietly tender, a melancholy elegy with a dark, unsettling undertow, best suited to a late night alone or a patient, undistracted evening. Pacing is deliberately fragmented and contemplative, moving through memory and present-tense isolation, and its emotional register is cool and oblique, following a hardened man slowly reckoning with fatherhood and a lonely woman's haunted desire for control. Intensity is significant: there is explicit sexual content, a few abrupt, brutal deaths, and a steady sense of dread, though gore is limited and the cruelty is mostly implied rather than shown. It is for viewers who want unhurried, sensorially rich sci-fi that prizes atmosphere and ambiguity over spectacle or explanation.
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