High Life follows a man named Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his baby
daughter Willow, the last survivors of a space mission composed of death
penalty-sentenced criminals who are sent toward a black hole to search for
alternative energy sources while being simultaneously subjected to human reproduction
experiments along the way.
Critics widely praise this movie
(83% as of writing at Rotten Tomatoes), so I got curious and watched it. At the
start, it feels intriguing because of the sense of mystery brought by its
non-linear storyline. Unfortunately, as
time passes, it just gets, er, messy – in various senses of the word. In the end, I found it to be a pointless,
cringe-worthy movie.
Look, I love sci-fi – whether
it’s the bombastic kind or the challenging kind. And I can relish sitting through and
deconstructing a tedious, taxing, weird, and confusing sci-fi film, as long as the
filmmakers truly purposed a genuine artistic value to its presentation and a
cerebral message underneath it (a recent example is Annihilation).
I don’t think
that’s the case with High Life.
Actually, immediately after
watching this, I felt it was pretentious trash.
But I held off judgment. Sometimes,
a difficult film just needs some time marinating in one’s mind before one realizes
its cleverness. Still, no good. I only hated it some more afterward as I only
further recognized that it wasted my time.
Of course, it was possible that I
just didn’t “get” it, and my taste is not as sophisticated as that of its admirers. That, or it’s just another product of post-modern cinema, in which a work may in reality be bankrupt of true appeal in the basic standards of beauty
and art, but whose value is artificially inflated by pompous, pretending
appraisers, and thus, begins to be undeservingly held on a premium by a conforming mob.
High Life is written and directed by French auteur Claire Denis. I’m not familiar with her body of work, so I
can’t use her past films as a benchmark or starting point for me to grasp her
intention with this film. So, with no
understanding of what she was going for, the final impression that the film left off to me was that it was made by someone who had a fetish for bodily fluids (yep, the movie has
sickening amounts of such).
The year is still early, but this
is probably the worst – or, at least, a strong candidate for the worst – film I’ve
seen in 2019.
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