It is an amazing head, its pale skin stretched across bone that is as geometrically distinct as a cubist portrait. Denis, who has a seductive visual style, spends a lot of time focused on Pattinson’s skull in “High Life,” which centers on his desultory character, Monte. He’s one of a small criminal crew of good-looking men and women (Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger and musician André Benjamin are onboard, too) who years ago agreed to participate in a space mission to avoid the death penalty. Their journey ostensibly has something to do with the Earth’s looming environmental catastrophe, but mostly plays out as an excuse for Denis to explore the farther, darker side of her imagination.
Denis’ work can be intoxicating, filled with strong, attention-seizing, mind-bending images that resonate powerfully. At times, beauty seems to stand alone, untethered to meaning; at other times, it underlines a tangible idea or generates significance by proxy. Years after seeing her film “Nénette et Boni” (1996), I don’t remember much about the story. But its startling, playfully erotic, intensely palpable reveries remain embedded in my memory: the white bunny nestled between a woman’s feathery high-heel mules, the baker’s wife with a creamy, teasing bosom who leans over a display of luscious pastries.
“High Life” has its share of striking images that sometimes fit together like puzzle pieces or just float into nothingness, similarly to that errant wrench. The story starts to take shape shortly after the birth of a girl, whose unexpected arrival disrupts the ship’s already fragile stability. Named Willow (and played in turn by Scarlett Lindsey and Jessie Ross), the baby is the first to survive the experimental interventions of Dibs (Juliette Binoche), the ship’s demented doctor. Wearing a long, heavy rope of braided hair, signaling the crew’s many years in space, Dibs has a criminal past, too, but she also has dominion over the other crew members, whom she medicates to keep docile.
Dibs isn’t running things, not at first, but she might as well be. She dresses the crew members’ wounds and tends to the sick, offers unwelcome douching advice to another woman and provides unorthodox if perhaps welcome TLC to a dying man. Her most significant and unusual duty, though, is collecting semen (donors are rewarded with pills) that she uses to impregnate the women. Dibs has her reasons, naturally, though they’re so unpersuasive that you have to wonder why Denis bothered, especially given that narrative logic isn’t much of interest to her. What interests Denis is everything else, including the disembodied exchange of bodily fluids between a man and a woman.
A few other things interest her, including desire, sublimated and unleashed. As is often the case in Denis’ movies, “High Life” vibrates with low-key erotic energy that can feel exciting, a little dangerous. (She wrote it with Jean-Pol Fargeau.) One reason is the obvious seductive appeal of performers like Pattinson, Binoche and Benjamin, whose faces and bodies are alternately flooded with flattering light or eye-straining washes of red and blue. But Denis doesn’t just prettify her actors: She lingers on their forms, their skin, stressing texture that becomes tactile. When her camera pans across a downy arm, you see it but also remember — and feel — the downiness and pleasures of other arms, legs, faces.
Things happen, some ridiculous and exasperating, others effectively and productively surprising (like Dibs’ desperate, lonely sexual writhing). Pattinson’s vivid presence and intimate voice-over help shape a movie that often feels on the verge of disintegrating. He keeps you watching, as do the images of reverberant, often haunting power and beauty, including a fecund garden in which kale, berries and gourds grow in bleak contrast to the ship’s laboratory fetuses. But too often the ideas here, visual and otherwise, feel haphazard — outer and inner space, Pattinson’s head, sexual taboo, apocalypse now or maybe then — more like material for a vision board than a fully realized vision.
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Additional Information:
‘High Life’
Rated R for graphic violence, including sexual, and a masturbation machine. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.