High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)

I'm no expert on the cinema of Claire Denis, but I haven't really connected with what I've seen of it thus far - and I'm afraid High Life isn't really an exception. It starts out well, with the pleasingly puzzling setup of Robert Pattinson (who's pretty strong throughout) and a baby girl alone together on a space station, and there are some interesting moves towards the end as well. But despite a bunch of good ideas and some effective visuals (often pleasingly low-key and low-budget) the middle section didn't quite do it for me. It's not that the issues of criminality, sexuality, time, and bodily fluids in space were expended at the mercy of a ropey allegory, which might have been a danger, but rather that its themes are so close to the surface that it doesn't really allow enough of a gap to even start speculating about the relationship between text and subtext (Juliette Binoche's character is a bit like a witch, which is therefore made reference to in the dialogue). There's a certain stiffness in the screenplay (as is so often the case in films not made in a director's native language), and I find a stiffness or lack of conviction in Binoche as well (as I not infrequently do in her English-language roles, actually). But the middle part of the film also, for me, suffered too often from a fact well-known to pornographers and makers of snuff movies: sex and violence can get boring. And I didn't quite believe that Denis was invested enough in the "harder" sci-fi elements of the film to really pull off the ending; nor did the film's invested-in-character-and-yet-keeping-its-distance procedure quite work at the end, for me - we either needed more fully-drawn characters or something more unexpected to crown things off. It is possible that another viewing would shuffle the elements and help me watch it in a different way; it's certainly the case that, of the latter-day entrants into the post-Solaris microgenre, this is vastly preferable to Interstellar.