High Life

2018 Directed by Claire Denis

Oblivion Awaits.

Monte and his baby daughter are the last survivors of a damned and dangerous mission to the outer reaches of the solar system. They must now rely on each other to survive as they hurtle toward the oblivion of a black hole.

Robert Pattinson Juliette Binoche André Benjamin Mia Goth Agata Buzek Lars Eidinger Claire Tran Ewan Mitchell Gloria Obianyo Victor Banerjee Scarlett Lindsey Jessie Ross Mikolaj Gruss Joni Brauer Johann Bartlitz Juliette Picollot Weronika Wachowska Mikolaj Zeman Ruslan Astraszewski Magda Piotrowska Dawid Gluchowski Lukasz Osik John Kimani Njeri Ernest Lebouco

113 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by Spencer Williams ★★★ 22

Claire Denis watching Interstellar: hmmm yés bùt whéré is thé cúm!!!!
Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 26

Semen-terstellar
Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½ 14

In many respects, the mesmerizing and elusive “High Life” is a first for writer-director Claire Denis: the first of her films to be shot in English, the first of her films to be set in space, and the first of her films to follow Juliette Binoche inside a metal chamber that’s referred to as “The Fuckbox,” where the world’s finest actress — playing a mad scientist aboard an intergalactic prison ship on a one-way trip to Earth’s nearest black hole — straddles a giant dildo chair and violently masturbates in a scene that’s endowed with the tortured energy of a Cirque du Soleil routine.
Needless to say, “High Life” isn’t your average science-fiction movie. In fact, Denis rejects the genre…
Review by brat pitt ★★★★ 9

an unholy mixture of both nihilism and optimism that only claire denis could pull off. it's a literal dog-eat-dog world out there, and the awful events happening in this film (systemic abuse of prisoners, rape, negative health effects from radiation, deadly experimentation) are happening every day in real life. in one early scene, the ethical implications of sending prisoners on a suicide mission to a black hole are reduced to dispassionate conversations between citizens on Earth, much like our reality. we check the news on twitter/in the paper/wherever and discuss with friends over a cup of coffee, angry but comfortable, while the people the stories are about suffer helplessly.
to be honest, i felt numb when i walked out of…
Review by Sean Baker 17

So happy I saw this on the big screen and had the opportunity to do so in Vancouver... at a multiplex. Not exactly the locale I'm used to being in when seeing a Claire Denis film.
I'm sure this will be one of my faves of the year. I felt as helplessly lost as the characters and that's a good thing. My fave Mia Goth performance so far. And the Yorick Le Saux cinematography is a nice blend of film and digital.
Arri Alexa (scenes in the spaceship)
Runcam Scope Camera 35 mm (in the black hole)
Super 16 mm (scenes on earth)
The Runcam Scope Camera 35 mm is not 35mm film, it is literally a camera inside a…
Review by adrianbalboa ★★★★ 9

google: here are the top-voted tags for HIGH LIFE, based on our user reviews:
Disturbing • Slow • Boring • Violent • Confusing • Unsettling • Dark • Creepy • Overrated
me: say no more! :)
Review by Karsten Runquist ★★★★ 10

Arriving veery fashionably late to this party BUT. This is way more brilliant than I thought it'd be. According to Denis this is her most heart-warming film and it's apparently, at its core, about love. That changed much of how I looked at this thing. She takes something like love, something that, to me, is codependent with time (for reasons that would require a separate essay) and places this "love" story in a setting like space where one could argue time doesn't exist for our characters. Not to mention our characters are in a position where instead of prioritizing work they prioritize love. Denis blends these ideas and uses them to ask how crucial love is to survival and gives us enough to not really have a clear answer, as we shouldn't. This is probably super obvious but I thought that was sick. It also looked great!
Review by Lucy ★★★★ 3

melancholy with dread filling up every corner, but i can’t say i wasn’t transfixed. and the simple concentrated concept of being lost and horny in space... her MIND
Review by deah ★★★★★ 2

rob pattinson baby talk asmr
Review by siobhan ★★★★★ 7

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

nooo robert pattinson don’t fly into a black hole ur so sexy aha
Review by Kristen Yoonsoo Kim ★★★★ 3

claire denis understands that the most open spaces can make the most oppressive prisons, especially when the autonomy over your body is at stake
Review by josh lewis ★★★★★ 9

Been careful to avoid hyperbole during this year's TIFF so I wanted to wait until I'd written about it in more detail to confirm but yeah I think this might be a masterpiece, my full review for The Film Stage:
While High Life has understandably drawn all kinds of comparisons to the 60s and 70s cerebral sci-fi canon (notably Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey), for both its abstract use of space imagery and its minimalist ship design which more often than not resembles an artificially-lit hospital filled with dated technology, its soul is firmly in the sensibilities of its filmmaker, French master Claire Denis, who mines the genre for a deeply sensorial and moving portrait of the misery and…

Recent reviews

Review by Gus Anderson ★

Probably shouldn’t even be logging this as I didn’t even finish it. As soon as I saw 3 different bodily fluids in the space of 10 minutes I tapped out. This thing is so boring, gross, and monotonous. Still don’t entirely understand the plot.
Review by Kayla ★★★★½

this insular film is packed with emotion. This is actually my first Denis film that I’ve ever watched and it has me so excited to see more. I think Robert Pattinson is absolutely blowing it out of the park he is showing that he has the finesse and the talent to carry films. Do I think that necessarily translates to his blockbuster work maybe not. This film is so powerful to me because of the relationship that Robert has with his daughter. The final shot is so moving and genuine that it makes me appreciate all the little textures and moments of life.
Review by Chuik ★★★½

Claire Denis logra un producto lleno de aciertos que conglomeran un resultado final más satisfactorio tras el procesamiento de la misma pasado un tiempo.
Destacaría el sello propio con el que cuenta la película, este ritmo pausado, arrítmico en según que intervalos, que la dotan de una vertiente pareciese intimista. Y es que este es uno de los puntos que degradan el conjunto, pues a pesar de la soledad experimentada por el personaje de Robert Pattinson durante un largo periodo, no ahondamos en él, en esa conversación con uno mismo que en tan pocas situaciones podría darse, este contexto es uno de ellos y se desaprovecha bajo mi punto de vista para haberle dado si cabe más matices a una…
Review by ErikHecht ★★★★½

More mid to low budget sci fi films like this please!
Review by Jordan Funke ★★★½

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Let me start with a warning that this film focuses heavily on rape, sexual assault and murder. It is extremely graphic, viscerally features every bodily fluid and then some, and is in general a disturbing, disgusting and depressing watch. All that said, if you can stomach it, I think it’s also quite good. As art, if not necessarily entertainment.
Told in an effective nonlinear style, High Life is the bleak sci-fi story of a young man named Monte (Pattinson) and his life on a spaceship. Throughout the course of the film, we find out that he and the dozen others aboard were death-row inmates sent on a space mission to a black hole. Among them is a deranged doctor (played…
Review by Kyle John Bennett ★★

Nothing really leads up to anything.
Good visuals and some interesting music choices sprinkled in.
Basically all the cast just seemed like NPCs walking about wanking
Review by onelastperil ★★

This could've been a deep cool movie about human nature through sending death row volunteers into space, but nope! They had to put in a shitty completely evil witch bitch obsessed with nonconsensually impregnation the female members, and holy shit! You end up believing things would've been mostly fine if she just wasn't there, and that doesn't make a compelling message. Ignoring all other plot holes and usage of other holes, I just can't get over the lack of a meaningful message. Maybe it's about how fucked up eugenics is? I dunno, it just seems frustrating af. What was the purpose
Review by Sander ★★½ 1

Oh I get it*
*I did not
Review by Trevor ★★½

What exactly is this movie? The entire time I had trouble piecing everything together... and then we get to the end, and I’ve fallen asleep. A bit pretentious without even really trying, too?
I’ll keep this in my back pocket for films to watch before taking a nap. For now, I need to run to Wikipedia to read the plot to understand even a little bit of what happened.
Review by Laura ★½

Even on-point spaghettification can't save two hours of unenjoyable space rape.
Review by dirkdigglr ★★

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

A lady on a spaceship craves that Pattinson dongjuice
Review by fer ★★★

robert pattinson being a dada and a daddy is a big yes from me.
the baby was so cute kskfkk 🥺🥰
the rest of the movie: 😳
the doctor was crazy
that blonde motherfucker with that stupid tattoo was awful i hate him.