High Life (2018)

Claire Denis spent fifteen years assembling High Life, and the result plays like a film that has been marinating in its own dread. A crew of death-row inmates drifts toward a black hole on a state errand to harvest energy, supervised by Juliette Binoche's Dr. Dibs, a scientist whose interest in artificial insemination borders on the liturgical. There is a masturbation chamber called the Box. There is a garden that reminds a prisoner of Earth. There is a great deal of sedative. The film is cold, elliptical, and sincere about its own bleakness, which is either a virtue or a dare depending on the viewer's appetite for European art-house suffering.

The social consciousness here is diffuse and largely incidental. The doomed crew is notably multiethnic, an international ensemble assembled by a European co-production, and the film never remarks on the fact. Race is not a subject. Nor is queerness, nor body image, nor neurodivergence, nor the climate. What critique exists is aimed at institutions: the state has leased its convicts to a scientist who treats them as disposable tissue, a faint indictment of exploitation that the film buries under existential gloom. A woman directs, and a woman conducts the experiments, but the treatment of motherhood, rape, and conception is so grim and unresolved that it resists any reading as a statement of empowerment.

Denis has no interest in instructing anyone. Her camera observes, her screenplay withholds, and the audience is left to assemble meaning from fragments. This is the opposite of sermonizing, and the film's refusal to moralize is its most consistent position. What we get instead is a meditation on reproduction as a biological compulsion, on fathers and daughters, on the vacuum. It is a serious work by a serious filmmaker, and it asks nothing of us except patience. The patience is rewarded, mostly. The lecture, mercifully, never arrives.