Lifeless

I've been listening to the podcast Filmspotting for some time now, enjoying their interesting angle into conversations about movies, and generally benefiting from their recommendations. I can think of cases where a movie I would never have heard of without Filmspotting turned out to be a personal favorite. But oh man, did they ever steer me wrong with High Life.

What if David Lynch had made Interstellar? That's probably not a truly accurate description of High Life, but it encapsulates the way I felt punked after the two hours I spent on this odd science fiction film starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche. Here's a better description: someone made an especially arty web series consisting of 5-minute episodes, then decided to release them in a random order.

This is the story of the one man left after a deep space mission to harness energy from a black hole. But he's not alone -- he's caring for his daughter, a toddler. Flashbacks tell us how this situation came to be, how the crew of the mission dwindled away, what they were all really doing there. It also reveals the strange experiments they were taking part in. It's a sequence of events that does finally all cohere, even if the non-linear narrative makes it harder than it needs to be to suss everything out. Yet none of what we learn really illuminates any character's motivation or explains their behavior to us.

There are a lot of ideas thrown into the mix here, but none have satisfying origins or conclusions. The idea of raising a child alone in deep space is compelling, but we barely get to see anything meaningful of that process. There are weird experiments being run, but we're never made to understand why these experiments. There are emotional touchstones skipped across the pond of this movie -- time spent in a lush garden, a sad episode involving dogs -- but they don't play out in a way that extracts any poignancy from the ideas. And one of the "episodes" in this story is borderline pornography, without (I felt) any clear narrative reason for it to be so explicit.

You could argue that there are a lot of beautiful visuals in this movie -- and for some, the visuals make a movie, as much as (or more than) the narrative. But even this aspect of the movie felt compromised to me. High Life is filmed (mostly, but not entirely) in an odd aspect ratio that doesn't fill the screen, leaving thin black vertical bars on the edges of the picture. It's not like a TV show from former 4:3 days; it's something all its own, both conspicuous and distracting for being so unusual.

Worst of all, the movie really doesn't all add up to much. I was pulled in just enough to want to see where this train wreck all wound up, but if I was expecting a satisfying ending, I was seriously disappointed. Indeed, I didn't even know that the ending was coming. I watched this movie (before the quaran-times) on an evening where my husband was gone for a few hours, and he returned before I had finished. I told him that I needed maybe 10 more minutes to get to the end... and then, when I hit "play" again, there turned out to be literally 20 seconds until the end credits. No closure, no nothing.

For someone reading this, High Life might well hit the sweet spot. But I wouldn't risk trying to describe that person when the cost of me being wrong, of that kind of person having a bad experience like mine, feels so very high. This is the worst movie I've seen in quite some time. I give it a D-.