'High Life' Is a Waste of Time

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.