Soft and Hard

There is a shot of an infant being carried by its father in Claire Denis’ L’intrus (2004) that may be the most rapt and tender image of its kind I’ve ever seen in a film. The first ten minutes of the director’s new High Life offer an extension and an elaboration of that shot, observing Monte (Robert Pattinson), apparently the sole adult survivor of a deep-space mission, as he feeds, changes, cuddles, and consoles the baby daughter, Willow, who is seemingly his only (living) companion on a spaceship divided into dormitory-style cells and littered with anachronistic-looking flat-screens. When the lithe, close-cropped Monte is not doting on his kid, he’s tending an artificially Edenic garden located somewhere in the ship’s bowels, a fertile space just waiting for sin to bloom there and, in doing so, give its verdancy meaning. After all, it’s only really paradise once it’s been lost.

“Taboo” is the first non-baby-talk word spoken aloud in and it’s also probably the last word on a film that is as troubling to watch and ponder as any since Denis’ own (2001), which it resembles both in its adoption of genre tropes—here science fiction instead of body horror—and its extreme, disturbingly sexualized violence. Gradually, it’s revealed that Monte and the other members of his mission (played by, among others, Mia Goth, Lars Eidinger, and a nicely self-effacing Andre 3000) were all convicts rather than trained astronauts; they were originally sent into space under the pretence of exploring a black hole, but were actually chosen for other, more nefarious reasons, and with no recourse to complaint because they’re criminals. Through a tangle of flashbacks (the excellent editing is by Guy Lecorne) we see the predictable, brutal results of putting so many aggressive, desperate people together in a confined location; in one early, unforgettable, -inflected shot, a cluster of space-suited corpses are shown being