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Claire Denis' "High Life," about a group of prisoners being used as guinea pigs in a deep space mission, is tailor-made for viewers who like science fiction in a cryptic 1970s art-house mode, and don't care if the movie is of-the-period (" The Man Who Fell to Earth ," " Alien ," " Silent Running ") or consciously aping it (" Under the Skin ," " Ex Machina ," " Annihilation ") as long as it delivers the goods by challenging the audience. There are no laser shootouts, lightsabers, spaceship battles, or talks of imperial succession here—just long, often eerily quiet scenes of adults being adults, in a futuristic environment that turns every situation into a metaphor and every metaphor into a situation. 

The film is another milestone in the career of its director/co-writer, whose filmography (which includes "Beau Travail," "The Intruder," " 35 Shots of Rum " and "Trouble Every Day") is rife with powerfully visceral tales of forbidden love and exotic locales. And it's yet another feather in the cap of its star,  Robert Pattinson , who has become one of the most reliably intense yet unaffected leading men in cinema—and who, with his former costar Kristen Stewart , is helping to keep a particular kind of auteur-driven, middle-budget art house film alive, at a time when 40 percent of yearly North American box office receipts come from family-targeted Disney properties. 

The story begins pretty far along in the life of its main character, Pattinson's Monte, a convict turned astronaut. He's first seen living alone on the aforementioned deep space vessel, a dark and messy place plagued by technical problems, taking care of a little girl named Willow (Scarlett Lindsay). As is often her m.o., Denis keeps her narrative cards close to her vest, observing Monte and Willow with such a potent mix of detachment and fascination that this prologue begins to feel like a documentary that has somehow time-warped in from the future. 

This section of "High Life" also offers one of the clearest demonstrations yet of Pattinson's sneaky star power. The directness of Denis' images is disarming: we could just as easily be watching surveillance footage of a single dad caring for a toddler in a dilapidated and otherwise empty public housing project. Ignoring the showbiz maxim warning actors never to share the screen with a dog or a child, Pattinson bonds with the audience by treating every moment between Monte and Willow as a record of simple actions: a feeding, a bedtime routine, a grown man attempting to dissuade a child from crying for the sake of his own mental health, and most affectingly, an attempt to enjoy "quality time" while doing a job that can't be put off until later (specifically, repairing the exterior of the spacecraft while talking to Willow via video link).

In due time, Denis and her cowriters Jean-Pol Fargeau (a regular collaborator) and Geoff Cox fill in the circumstances that led to this dire predicament. Lars Eidinger is the mission’s captain, who seems to have no authority whatsoever. The true commander of the mission seems to be Dr. Dibs ( Juliette Binoche ), who performs experiments on herself and the others. " Suspiria " costar  Mia Goth plays the edgiest crew member,  Jessie Ross a more optimistic counterpart. André Benjamin , otherwise known as André 3000 of Outkast, is Tcherny, who left his family behind on earth and now tends to the ship's greenhouse. 

And it's in the greenhouse that a film set in the weightless reaches of space finds a dramatic center of gravity. "High Life" takes its sweet time drinking in the ship's plant life (shades of special effects-master-turned-director Douglas Trumbull's 1972 eco-thriller "Silent Running," an obvious reference point). These images of fecundity, of pistils and stamens, haunt the remainder of the story. Like so much else in this symbol-attuned film, they are plain, organic objects that are just what they appear to be (plants that supply the ship's crew with food and oxygen) and, at the same time, emblems of fertility, in a movie that's obsessed with sex, reproduction, parenting, and the perpetuation of humankind. 

By fragmenting the narrative and moving around through time, as Denis loves to do, "High Life" becomes a kaleidoscopic experience, more so than a traditional story. The filmmaker immediately establishes that something happened to the crew, then tells us what it was, but doesn't fill in the blanks on exactly how it all happened until she's good and ready. This is an alternately disturbing, intellectually stimulating, scary, erotic, and revolting collection of moments that you're supposed to watch, listen and react to, not necessarily process as one might a traditional linear narrative, or some kind of cinematic equation that can be unlocked like the final level of a videogame. 

Any film that takes a somewhat realistic view of space travel is bound to get compared to " 2001: A Space Odyssey ," but this one deserves it. It makes the ship feel as tactile as the interior of a submarine, or a prison. Atmosphere and sensation are everything. The sound of a character's breathing, footsteps or muttered curses can be as meaningful as any expository line of dialogue (of which there are surprisingly few until Binoche's spacey-scary Dr. Dibs starts monologuing).   

What does it all mean? I have a take but would rather not share it here, in a review that's trying to convey the spirit of an elliptical and mysterious film without revealing all of its surprises and puzzlements. Suffice to say that it's the kind of movie that's direct enough in its imagery to make you feel as if you're just visiting a place that exists, yet expansive enough in its poetic and narrative aspirations to make room for a spacewalk, a daringly extended sequence of a crew-member riding a sex machine, several idealistic conversations about science and survival, a psychedelic mission to a black hole, and a final act that's at once inspirational and unbearably sad.

It's the kind of film that sparks arguments on the way home, not just about what happened and what it meant, but whether it was a good movie—and if not, precisely which expectations it failed to satisfy, and whether it ever intended to satisfy them. With its brutal violence, explicit sex, and up-close views of blood, sweat, urine, and semen, it is proudly an R-rated film, verging on NC-17—though the X-rating, which was discontinued by the MPAA almost 30 years ago, might feel more appropriate. Everything about this movie is retro, from the opaque yet fully felt performances (led by Pattinson) that make the audience come to the actors rather than the other way around, to Stuart Staples' analog synthesizer-heavy soundtrack, to the closing credits song by Tindersticks featuring none other than Pattinson, whose vocals suggest what Chris Isaak might sound like if he lost his will to live. 

If you've read this far, you know whether this is your kind of movie. If you think it is, it is—and then some.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

High Life (2019)

Rated R for disturbing sexual and violent content including sexual assault, graphic nudity, and for language.

110 minutes

Robert Pattinson as Monte

Juliette Binoche as Dr. Dibs

André Benjamin as Tcherny

Mia Goth as Boyse

• Claire Denis
• Jean-Pol Fargeau

Cinematographer

• Yorick Le Saux
• Guy Lecorne
• Stuart Staples
• Tindersticks

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Movie Reviews

'high life' is a stunning space odyssey — with a baby on board.

Justin Chang

Jessie Ross and Robert Pattinson are astronauts traveling toward an uncertain destination in High Life. A24 hide caption

Jessie Ross and Robert Pattinson are astronauts traveling toward an uncertain destination in High Life.

High Life is like no outer space movie you've ever seen, even if you recognize some of its artistic influences.

A bare description of the plot — about a doomed crew of astronauts traveling millions of miles from Earth — might suggest Ridley Scott's Alien and its countless gory imitators. The spaceship has a lush greenhouse that seems inspired by Douglas Trumbull's eco-parable Silent Running, while the mood of existential gloom feels straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky's science-fiction landmarks Solaris and Stalker .

'White Material,' An Insufficient Armor In The End

But the sensibility behind High Life is unmistakably that of the great Claire Denis, one of the most exciting filmmakers working in France and indeed the world. Her movies, such as Beau Travail and White Material, are hauntingly beautiful objects, often elusive in narrative structure but overpowering in texture and atmosphere. She takes an honestly grim view of humanity, but her camera is always extraordinarily attuned to the beauty and complexity of the world that humanity inhabits.

That world has now expanded to include deep space, and for Denis, a filmmaker whose style already tends toward the hallucinatory and dreamlike, it feels less like a departure than a logical progression. If you're coming to her work for the first time, you might find High Life chilly, forbidding and mysterious to the point of bafflement. You might also be held rapt by the intoxicating beauty of her images, the hypnotic rhythms of her editing and her skill at weaving an atmosphere of unspeakable dread.

Robert Pattinson gives a quietly charismatic performance as Monte, a young man we first meet taking care of an adorable baby girl aboard the spaceship. It's a tender but disturbing sight: What is a child doing in outer space, and why are the two of them all alone? Why does the ship look like an old, boxy relic from the '70s, full of leaky pipes and outdated computers?

The answers emerge as the story moves slowly but purposefully back and forth through time, reuniting us with the members of Monte's crew and revealing the sinister circumstances under which they died.

In The Art-House Sci-Fi Film 'High Life,' No Aliens — Just Alienation

We get to know a few of them, including a soulful gardener played by the hip-hop artist André Benjamin and a fierce young woman played by Mia Goth. We learn that all of them, including Monte, were convicted of violent crimes on planet Earth and then blasted into space as part of a government mission to investigate a distant black hole: an interesting way to serve out a life sentence, all in the name of science.

The group's self-appointed leader is a doctor played by a diabolical Juliette Binoche, who's hellbent on performing an experiment of her own. She wants to achieve human reproduction in space, to bring a child into this God-forsaken emptiness.

A master manipulator who's not above using physical restraints and psychological games to get what she wants, Dr. Dibs collects sperm samples from the men and uses them to inseminate the women. The only one who doesn't take part at first is Monte, who has taken a vow of celibacy.

Denis' filmmaking has a visceral, sometimes splattery intensity, and in High Life she directs our attention not outward, toward the mysteries of the cosmos, but inward, toward the messiness of our own biology. What fascinates her here is the human body, its needs and desires, the way it reacts and breaks down in a hostile environment. If there's another movie spaceship with a private autoerotic chamber designed to relieve the astronauts' frustrations, I haven't seen it.

As the doctor's experiment progresses and the group dynamics begin to spin out of whack, High Life builds to an almost ecstatic frenzy of physical and sexual violence. The movie becomes a stunning vision of human entropy, a space odyssey smeared in blood, tears, breast milk and other effluvia.

That may not sound terribly inviting, but Denis' vision is indelible. High Life is some kind of strange masterpiece, and its brutality is ultimately matched by its exquisite tenderness of feeling. In time the story returns to that vision of Monte and his young child, traveling together toward an uncertain destination. Denis gets you to feel the depths of their isolation, but also their curious contentment: The great, unfathomable void of outer space has become the only home they will ever know or need.

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‘High Life’ Review: Robert Pattinson Is Lost in Space

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By Manohla Dargis

• April 4, 2019

Every so often in “High Life,” the latest from the French director Claire Denis, there’s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something — a wrench, a body — floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there’s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms of violence, the rising and setting of Robert Pattinson’s head.

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 the 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’s 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 T.L.C. 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’s 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’s 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.

High Life Rated R for graphic violence, including sexual, and a masturbation machine. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

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High Life Reviews

Composed of equal parts mystery, thriller and speculative fiction, High Life starts off slowly but rewards patience, gradually working towards a finale which weaves elements of Interstellar and 2001: A Space Odyssey into something uniquely Claire Denis.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

It may be too lofty to call High Life a microcosm of humanity; then again, it may not be. Denis seems to liken the isolation of a few people trapped on a ship hurtling through space to the entire human experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 3, 2022

Episode 37: Edge of Tomorrow / Forbidden Planet / High Life

Full Review | Original Score: 78/100 | Oct 4, 2021

With each thread you find yourself trying to unravel, Denis stays just on the opaque end of decipherable...for sci-fi diehards that read about a big movie star in a new space movie, it's definitely something other than what you'd expect.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

Combining aspects of horror, sci-fi and prison drama, the film is a challenging puzzle that even the most devout Denis fans may struggle to piece together, but that doesn't negate its thrilling, terrifying viewing experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 8, 2021

Frozen bodies vertically floating in space, meteor showers, baby eating dirt in the vegetable garden, dead dog in the stream, sudden burst of violence and emotions that puts High Life very much in the top tier of all Claire Denis-ean film.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2021

Pattinson soars ahead despite a strong cast, fully embracing his recently discovered ability for expressive silence. Aboard the vessel, sex, hostility and violence seem inevitable, but are still so shocking.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 8, 2021

A perfect grown-up antidote to all of the usual whiz-bang summer blockbusters.

Full Review | Feb 8, 2021

A merciless inspection of what becomes of people if they forsake their own corporeal poetics and desires, High Life shows how inescapable the tight grip of desire is, even when it's drained of its lively fluids.

Full Review | Jan 29, 2021

In spite of the restrictions imposed, the situation can turn very emotional, erotic, and perverse at the same time [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Sep 19, 2020

There's no doubt that Denis conjures a woozy, dreamlike nightmarescape here, but it doesn't amount to all that much.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 15, 2020

Not many filmmakers can pull off such idiosyncrasies without drawing attention to themselves, but Denis makes a cogent meditation on humankind and its ingrown constructs.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 27, 2020

In its final moment, High Life transforms the scientific unknown into transcendent hope - the only kind of hope it accepts.

Full Review | Jun 30, 2020

It is a science fiction sensory journey, one that is existential, lubricious, and highly stimulating. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 27, 2020

High Life is a sufficiently sinister space voyage, but one without all that much to say.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Jun 24, 2020

HIGH LIFE is a story so simple it loops back to the profound and so focused on its characters it collapses through the event horizon to feel universal.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2020

High Life is just the right kind of gradual sci-fi film we need, interweaving reality and the truth of our fragility with the fragmented solitude of space.

Full Review | Feb 6, 2020

It's an interesting premise, but the structural flaws and unlikable screenplay put to waste the attractive production design.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 8, 2020

It has the moody flavor of some "existential" '70s-era sci-fi dramas like Tarkovsky's Solaris or Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running, but with a more overtly sexual tone and with lovely, old-school special effects. I just wish it was more fun.

Full Review | Jan 7, 2020

Every film by French master Claire Denis is a cultural event, and this, her English-language debut, is a demented, deeply engrossing sci-fi saga...

Full Review | Dec 23, 2019

‘High Life’ Review: Robert Pattinson’s Spaced-Out Sci-Fi Will Stun You

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

As the vampire stud of the Twilight franchise, Robert Pattinson hit multiplex paydirt. Since then, he’s been raising his personal bar in the indie sphere ( Good Time, Damsel ). The star does himself proud in this elusive but bracing brainteaser from Claire Denis, the great French filmmaker ( Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day ) who’d much rather challenge audiences than coddle them. High Life is the writer-director’s first film in English, and the only one set in space. In the script she wrote with Jean-Pol Fargeau, her concerns about existence in all its ferocity and folly remain the same. Humans are hurtling toward a void they can’t fully comprehend or evade.

Pattinson, in a role once planned for the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, plays Monte, an astronaut alone on a prison ship, except for an infant girl named Willow (Scarlett Lindsey) and the lifeless bodies of a doomed crew. He coos and sings to his infant daughter while offering advice she couldn’t possibly grasp: “Never drink your own urine, never eat your own shit — even if they’ve been recycled.” Such practices are “taboo,” a word and a concept that holds no fear for Denis, whose attraction for the forbidden is a hallmark of her art.

High Life raises questions that Denis perversely, and with sustained provocation, rarely bothers to answer. Take the crew members and the circumstances under which they died. There are flashbacks, but the movie is less interested in explanations than in elliptical clues. We know the ship is meant to extract energy from a black hole. That’s the suicide mission that drives the plot. The support systems on the ship must be renewed every 24 hours, and if eventually there’s no one alive it to do the job, the word is kaput.

For a science fiction film, High Life keeps its distance from the usual bells and whistles of the genre, preferring the minimalism of Yorick Le Saux’s spare cinematography and the near-subliminal hum of Stuart Staples’ score. It’s left to the actors to provide whatever vestiges of humanity remain in these travelers who quickly realize that space is the ultimate prison. Andre Benjamin excels as Tcherny, the one who obsesses over the ship’s greenhouse as if the dirt beneath his feet can somehow ground him in reality. And Mia Goth brings a striving urgency to Boyse, a woman whose natural desires are subverted by a system that sees her only a guinea pig for reproductive experiments.

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That leads us to the French sorceress Juliette Binoche, braided up like Rapunzel in the role of Dibs, a doctor tasked with caring for all the prisoners on board. Instead, this unforgettably unhinged woman is obsessed with harvesting their eggs and semen for her own nefarious purposes. The celibate Monte, known to the crew as “Monk” or “Mr. Blue Nuts,” is having none of it. “I keep my fluids to myself,” he insists. Not while Dibs is around. The mad doctor has her methods. She also has the “Fuckbox,” a chamber of sex toys that would bring a blush to all 50 shades of Christian Grey; it’s also filled with body-horror implications Denis delights in unpacking.

Yes, there’s a chill in the French filmmaker’s intellectual precision. Yet this brilliant innovator offers the sight of Monte connecting emotionally with the grown Willow (Jessie Ross), the child he never wanted, as the years take them closer to oblivion. The actor even sings a lullaby to Willow over the end credits. Is that a glimmer of hope poking through this bleak space odyssey? With Denis there’s always more than meets the prism of snap judgements. Let the movie mess with your head.

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High Life review – Robert Pattinson electrifies in sci-fi odyssey

An evil doctor and a monkish man consider their crimes in space in Claire Denis’s stirring English-language debut

T he less you know about Claire Denis ’s existential sci-fi odyssey, the more assaulting the ride. In brief, a monkish young man (Robert Pattinson) and an evil doctor (Juliette Binoche) are among a handful of prisoners sent to space to contemplate their crimes; an infant on board their spaceship is both a miracle and a chilling reminder.

Since his breakout role in The Twilight Saga , Pattinson’s career choices have been fascinating to observe from afar. He’s made films with David Cronenberg, David Michôd, James Gray and the Safdie brothers ; all acclaimed film-makers, but hardly popular and certainly not as well known as the star himself. His collaboration with Denis, doyenne of spare, nonverbal French cinema, is maybe his most electric yet. In many scenes it is just Pattinson and the baby; action-wise, there’s a lot of wandering deserted corridors and performing dull daily rituals. Yet as Monte, Pattinson is as subtle, exacting and unpredictable as he’s ever been, transmitting bone-deep loneliness and resigned fatalism with very little dialogue to help him.

“Constant acceleration creates a sense of weightlessness,” he says, aware that the ship is headed straight into the mouth of a black hole. They can’t feel themselves hurtling towards infinite doom, he seems to be saying, but in Denis’s soul-stirring English language debut, the gravitational pull of sex, death and the void is palpable.

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'High Life' Review: The Sweetest, Most Sinister Sci-Fi Movie in Years

All the intensity of Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is here, but the beauty of that film has been stripped away.

High Life is a movie about Robert Pattinson raising a baby on a spaceship. It’s also so much more: a parable for the prison-industrial complex, an exploration of interstellar travel and String Theory, and a movie where André 3000 calls Pattinson “mister blue nuts.” But in its opening scenes, it’s easy to pretend that French director Claire Denis’ new film (her first in English) is the charming story of an astronaut and his daughter as she learns to take her first steps on a rocket ship racing through the cosmos.

Even when Pattinson opens the door to his spaceship (a giant gray rectangle traveling away from Earth towards the nearest black hole at the speed of light) and casually tosses several dead bodies into the blackness in one of the movie’s first scenes, there’s something pleasantly dreamlike about that action. It’s not until High Life jumps back in time to explain how Pattinson found himself in space as the sole guardian of an infant that the movie truly unravels into something sinister.

Saying anymore about the plot of High Life essentially qualifies as a spoiler for a movie where the main action is simply watching the story unravel across the past, present, and future (never in that order). If you’d rather go in mostly blind, just know that you’re in for something viscerally discomforting. All the intensity of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is here, but the beauty of that film has been stripped away. The spaceship is dim and beige, and the uniforms match. The only good thing left on this edge of the universe is the love between a father and his daughter.

Ok, spoilers : As we learn midway through High Life as the story shifts back in time to the voyage’s origins, this is no ordinary spaceship. Everyone onboard is a criminal, sentenced to death on Earth but offered a chance to serve society in space as part of a scientific experiment. That includes Pattinson’s character, Monte, along with his fellow inmates Tcherny (André Benjamin, aka André 3000, who it turns out is a pretty great actor in this small but powerful role), Boyse (Mia Goth) and a handful of other young criminals turned lab rats. Even Dr. Dibs (Juliette Bînoche), who’s presumably on board to run the experiment, was a convicted murderer back home.

André 3000 in 'High Life'

The idea came to Denis during a trip to Texas after she read an article about a town that wondered if their death row inmates could be put to use, the director explained at a premiere event at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“They said: It’s really hard to spend so much money on these people,” she recalled. “We should use them for good reason.”

Combine that bit of 21st century American horror with another movie idea she had for a man all alone in the universe except for his daughter and the result is High Life

As for the experiment happening onboard Denis’ ship (basically a large windowless jail), it’s twofold. First, Dr. Dibs attempts to impregnate her subjects in an effort to learn if childbirth is possible in space (Pattinson abstains, hence “mister blue nuts”). A series of sterile, scientific attempts all fail with horrific results until Dibs takes matters into her own hands, leading to the birth of that one perfect baby. The second experiment begins once they reach a black hole and attempt to achieve orbit around its gravity, which could potentially lead to a huge breakthrough in energy production. (The science here is never particularly clear, but it never matters.)

Juliette Bînoche with Robert Pattinson

If any of this actually sounds reasonable you should definitely watch High Life , which makes it clear that the entire mission is nothing but an exercise in cruelty. We soon learn that the research these inmates do will never make it back to Earth. Meanwhile, onboard the ship, enforced order quickly devolves into chaos, leading to multiple moments of sexual assault that illustrate the way prison strips humans of their humanity and corrupts those in a position of power.

Violence and death quickly follow, and before long Pattinson is alone with his daughter. Of course, we knew this was coming. High Life starts with a man and his child all alone and that’s how it ends too. But by the time we make it back to that moment, even the beauty of their pure relationship has been stripped away.

All that’s left is endless, lonely space.

High Life is in select theaters now.

High Life Review

07 May 2019

In an alternative space-time continuum, the premise of High Life — Death Row convicts are sent into space on a do-or-die mission to harness the energy of a black hole — is Jerry Bruckheimer ’s quasi sequel to Armageddon . Yet, in French director Claire Denis ’ hands, it is pretty much the polar opposite: gruelling sci-fi, high on big ideas, disturbing imagery and narrative longueurs, low on retina-popping CGI, production values and Ben Affleck . It will alienate some — there’s male rape, leaky breast milk and no attempt to spoon-feed — but if you stick with it, Denis’ first English-language film reaches the parts phasers and warp speed can’t reach.

Just as last year’s Let The Sunshine In (also starring Binoche ) was a more sophisticated, deeper, messy take on the romcom, so High Life is Denis’ personalised stamp on sci-fi. Its plot core of an expedition to exploit the power of a black hole functions as a jumping-off point to a study in fear and loathing as it becomes clear to the crew they are on a suicide mission. Denis exacerbates the tense mood with a deliberately uneven sense of pacing, slow sections where seemingly nothing is happening punctuated by moments of gory violence and shattering intensity. The latter reaches its zenith inside the ‘fuckbox’, a dark room fitted out with mechanised dildos and straps designed to relieve sexual frustration. The orgasmatron from Woody Allen’s Sleeper , it is not.

Denis mounts a palpable sense of dread.

The ‘fuckbox’ is the domain of Juliette Binoche’s Dr Dibs, a scarred, long-haired mad scientist drugging her guinea pigs in exchange for their bodily fluids. Binoche is terrific here, her unhinged sexuality recalling Louis Malle’s Damage , but this is Pattinson ’s film. Operating in a much lower key to everyone else — his character is dubbed Mr Blue Balls because he chooses celibacy — his performance, played out mostly in close-up and without dialogue, provides the film’s singular sense of connection and tenderness, especially in flashbacks with his daughter.

Filling the film with indelible images, such as bodies floating in space over the title card, and a discomfiting drone of a soundtrack by Tindersticks’ Stuart Staples, Denis plays slow and tight with the trappings of the genre. Here an astronaut’s glove, rather than floating away in gravity, hangs heavy in the air while a space spanner drops like a brick. There are trace elements of sci-fi history here, be it Stalker (the sense of mystery), Silent Running (verdant garden-tending), Alien (corridors, lots of corridors) and Blake’s 7 (’70s-styled control panels), but Denis mounts a palpable sense of dread here that has nothing to do with xenomorphs or event horizons. High Life is a film marinated in solitude, anguish and desire. Forget space — in oblivion, no-one can hear you scream.

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‘high life’: film review | tiff 2018.

Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche star in French director Claire Denis’ first English-language effort 'High Life,' which world premiered in Toronto.

By Jordan Mintzer

Jordan Mintzer

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When it was announced that Claire Denis was making a sci-fi movie, and one starring Robert Pattinson , it was impossible to imagine what the outcome would be. But it’s certain that no matter what you could conjure up in your brain, you wouldn’t come up with anything close to High Life — a film both sensual and disturbing, strangely fascinating and slightly tedious, tender and off-putting, bold and also a bit stilted.

In other words, High Life is a mixed bag filled with contradictions and complexity. And in some ways, it’s not really a sci-fi movie, or at least a typical one, with Denis using the story of a spaceship populated by human guinea pigs merely as a pretext to explore themes present across her 30-year career: desire and its fatal consequences, the beauty of the body and the harm we sometimes inflict upon it, the lives of outcasts who exist on the margins of our world, the warm and tenuous relationship parents can have with their children — longing, violence, sex, death.

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Set almost entirely aboard a floating penal colony that looks like a shipping container on the outside and a boiler room/urgent care clinic on the inside, the film eschews many classic science-fiction cliches while providing a few moments of space opera bliss. But mostly it’s a dark, carnal claustrophobic and at times bluntly violent chamber piece that takes place on a vessel racing toward its inevitable doom. As such, it’s hard to see High Life reaching a sizable public despite a fully engaging Pattinson and Denis’ art house renown. But the director’s ardent fans will likely find much to admire here — especially the fact that the 72-year-old French auteur remains a fearless filmmaker who, in her own way, has gone this time where no man (or woman) has gone before.

The only distant predecessors are probably Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker , which Denis calls her “good luck charms” in the press notes and whose influence you can feel in the way she cuts between the harsh surfaces of the spaceship (which have a very video-like HD look to them) and the grainier textures of Earth (which were shot on 16mm). And perhaps there’s also a sliver of Kubrick in High Life , whether in the moments we see space pods hurtling toward the abstraction of black holes, or else in the unlikely presence of a baby (Scarlett Lindsey) aboard the ship — except this one is no Star Baby but very much the real thing. Perhaps in space no one can hear you scream, but we definitely hear this baby scream quite a lot during the film’s opening reel.

The child’s father — or at least guardian, as the relationships between the different characters remain fairly opaque for a portion of the film — is Monte (Pattinson), a young man who seems to be stuck alone on the vessel, doing his best to keep himself and the baby alive. We soon find out that Monte is in fact accompanied by an inanimate crew whose bodies are piled up lifelessly in a storage room, until he summarily discards of them all.

After that extended opening sequence, the story — by Denis and regular co-writer Jean-Pol Fargeau (Zadie Smith was apparently attached to the project at one point but is not credited here) — is told mostly through flashbacks, revealing how Monte came to be the last prisoner standing in a futuristic detention center where detainees are free to roam around but must abide by one rule: The men have to donate their sperm and the woman their eggs and their bodies, allowing their nefarious supervisor and fellow prisoner, Dr. Dibs ( Juliette Binoche ), to engage in procreation tests, the results of which are beamed back home.

If that sounds like a harsh setup, it certainly is, especially when Denis shows how things work in candid detail: the men (played by Andre Benjamin, Lars Eidinger and Ewan Mitchell) masturbate into cups in exchange for sleeping pills, while the women (played by Mia Goth, Agata Buzek, Claire Tran and Gloria Obianyo) are impregnated and then left to give birth to babies who are quickly taken away from them. (A shot of one character covered with the breast milk she cannot feed to her own child is one of many provocative images on display here. Some of those images seemed to provoke a number of walkouts during the film’s world premiere in Toronto.) 

The only prisoner who won’t take part in the process is Monte, who has gone celibate and lives pretty much as a loner among the others. But his attitude eventually results in what many will deem to be the film’s most troubling scene, involving rape and a highly invasive form of artificial insemination. The other scene likely to cause a stir is when Binoche’s character enters the spaceship’s “fuckbox,” which is basically a soundproof masturbation chamber replete with bondage pulleys and a silver dildo you can operate with a leather seat.

Denis gives us an extended sequence inside the box, with DP Yorick Le Saux (who has shot many Olivier Assayas movies) covering Binoche’s thrashing about in shaky handheld close-ups filled with a violent sensuality to them. There are a few other such visual highlights, although High Life doesn’t really have the look or feel of Denis’ other work, with the limited setting containing the action way too much. Also, video just doesn’t seem like the right medium for a director whose cinematography has always had a warm and fleeting quality to it, rather than some of the sharp imagery we get here.

Likewise, the space exteriors (and there are only a handful of them) can come across as slapdash and unoriginal, as if Denis were only doing the bare minimum in that department — although a shot of stars swirling around a black hole, like sperm swimming around an ovum, is memorable. Other elements work better, such as the haunting score by regular composer Stuart A. Staples (of the Tindersticks) and production design by Francois-Renaud Labarthe ( Personal Shopper ) that gives the ship a very dirty and dysfunctional sheen, mirroring the lives of its turbulent passengers, who can only remain in peace for so long.

But without Denis’ typically transfixing aesthetics and with a storyline that lumbers along in places, High Life is not always an easy sit, even if occasional outbursts of violence spice up the action in distressing ways. And despite a committed performance from a very watchable Pattinson — Denis definitely brings out the man’s beauty in certain shots, bathing him in floods of red light — the film also feels rather inert, taking us full circle toward a climax that seems inevitable but doesn’t necessarily register as powerfully as it should. The fact that some of the English-language dialogue sounds clumsy or unnatural doesn’t help matters, either.

It ultimately feels like Denis chose the sci-fi template to indulge in ideas that have graced some of her darker movies (especially Trouble Every Day and Bastards , whose blood and body count are equaled in this film), which means people who truly appreciate her work may find much to chew on here. But while her best films managed to bring us on board with their elliptical narratives and swooning visuals, High Life keeps us on board the ship the whole time, but also at bay. It shows how much the director remains a unique, subversive talent of world cinema, with the result being that perhaps only a chosen few will go along with her for this ride.  

Production companies: Andrew Lauren Productions, Pandora Film Produktion, Alcatraz Films, The Apocalypse Film Company, Madants Cast: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Andre Benjamin, Mia Goth, Agata Buzek Director: Claire Denis Screenwriters: Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, in collaboration with Geoff Cox Producers: Andrew Lauren, D.J. Gugenheim, Claudia Steffen, Christophe Friedel, Laurence Clerc, Olivier Thery Lapiney, Oliver Dungey, Klaudia Smieja Executive producers: Julia Balaeskoul Nusseibeh, Isabel Davis Director of photography: Yorick Le Saux Production designer: Francois-Renaud Labarthe Costume designer: Judy Shrewsbury Editor: Guy Lecorne Composer: Stuart A. Staples Casting directors: Des Hamilton, Piotr Bartuszek Sales: Wild Bunch Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)

110 minutes

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The Ending Of High Life Explained

"High Life" is the 2018 sci-fi/horror psychological thriller that stars Robert Pattinson , André Benjamin, and Juliette Binoche as three crew members on an ethically dubious mission beyond the universe. If you like your sci-fi to be less "Alien" and "Star Wars" and more "Solaris" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," it should be right up your alley. Like those latter two films, "High Life" isn't exactly forthcoming about what it's up to, so chances are you might need a little help understanding the ending. That's where we come in.

Told in non-chronological order, "High Life" opens on a space ship whose crew is dead except for two passengers: Monte (Pattinson) and his baby daughter, Willow (Scarlette Lindsey). Then the movie shifts to show us how they got into this situation. Besides the captain Chandra (Lars Eidinger) and the medical officer Dr. Dibs (Binoche), the crew is made up entirely of prisoners from Earth. The mission's organizer (Victor Banerjee) offered them positions on the crew as a way to escape, but it's clear that joining the mission is just another form of imprisonment. Ostensibly, the purpose of the mission is to study the effects of deep-space radiation and black holes on human astronauts. But the sadistic Dr. Dibs begins performing her own experiments on the crew, attempting to conceive babies in space. Things spiral out of control and the crew members begin killing each other, but Dibs' project ultimately does show results when Boyse (Mia Goth) gives birth to Willow–even though everything about her conception is heinous. 

"High Life" is about people trying to find hope in a hopeless situation. Ultimately there's no way for Monte and teenaged Willow (Jessie Ross) to escape their fates with their lives, but it's still a somewhat hopeful ending for two characters living in a bleak world. 

When Monte becomes a father, he tries to make the best of an awful situation

In an interview with No Film School , Pattinson and director Claire Denis spoke about the film and its themes. The ship's crew members are all former prisoners who were sold on the idea of escaping Earth in order to serve science, but the ship is really just another prison. "The people controlling everything have no obligation to tell you the rules or anything, so you're living in this environment where everything can change on the dime," Pattinson said. "People can just experiment on you. You try and rebel against things, but you don't really know what's coming at any point and you have no autonomy."

Pattinson's character, Monte, tries to rebel against Dr. Dibs' experiments by refusing to participate. He's the only crew member who stays celibate and avoids the masturbatory "Black Box," which Dibs uses to harvest the crew's genetic material and attempts to impregnate the crew's female members. But like Pattinson said in the interview, rebellion is futile. Dibs simply drugs him, sexually assaults him, and uses his semen to conceive Willow. 

Shortly after Willow is born, Dibs dies by suicide, leaving Monte and Willow as the only two survivors on a ship that can't return to Earth. It's an impossible environment in which to raise a child, especially one that was conceived without anyone's consent. And yet, when we first meet Monte, that's exactly what he's doing. Willow is the closest thing Monte has to hope in his situation.

The other characters' fates mirror Monte and Willow's

After we meet Monte and baby Willow, the movie details the fates of the other crew members. All of them die in different ways related to their doomed mission. Chandra develops leukemia from radiation and Dibs euthanizes him. Elektra (Gloria Obianyo) gives birth to a stillborn baby and later dies from complications. Mink (Claire Tran) stabs Ettore (Ewan Mitchell) to death after he attempted to sexually assault her and Boyse. An enraged Mink then tries to kill Dibs, but Monte is forced to kill her first. Later, a guilt-stricken and hopeless Dibs throws herself out of the airlock and into space.

But there are two deaths that foreshadow Monte and Willow's final moment: Boyse's and Tcherny's (Benjamin). The terminally ill pilot Nansen (Agata Buzek) was selected for the mission so that she could fly a smaller shuttle into a black hole and allow the crew to observe the results. But before she can do that, Boyse murders her with a shovel and takes her place. Rather than remain on the doomed vessel, Boyse chooses to escape into the unknown. 

Shortly after Boyse's death, Tcherny decides to end his life in the ship's verdant garden. Earlier, he says that the garden is the only place that reminds him of home and Earth, and the wife and child he left behind. While Tcherny can't end his life surrounded by his loved ones, this is the closest alternative he can get.

In the end, Monte and Willow's decision is a combination of Boyse and Tcherny's choices.

What's up with the ship full of dogs?

Toward the end of "High Life," Monte and Willow realize that they're not the first crew sent on a doomed mission into deep space. Their ship locates another identical one. When Monte boards it, he discovers that it's entirely populated by stray dogs, which have all eaten each other to survive. Just like Monte and Willow, the few remaining dogs are the victims of a twisted experiment, and Monte's discovery has obvious implications for where he and Willow will end up — earlier in the movie, Monte was forced to shut down most of the ship's non-essential systems to conserve power. If things continue as they are, Monte and Willow will meet a similar fate as the dogs.

Willow asks her father to bring one of the dogs back onto their ship for companionship, but Monte fears that this would contaminate them. While it's possible that a stray dog might literally infect Monte and Willow, Monte is really worried that if his daughter learns the truth about the first ship, it will make her lose whatever hope she has for the future. He withholds the truth as a way to protect her.

But the discovery of the dog ship is a turning point for Monte as a character. He understands that no amount of hope is going to save him and his daughter. This sets the stage for their final choice.

Why do Monte and Willow fly through the black hole?

As Monte and Willow get closer to the black hole, Willow suggests that they pilot the ship's remaining shuttle into it. Monte agrees. It's a hopeful moment for both of them, for very different reasons.

Despite her conception, Willow is the only character who's innocent in this story. She didn't witness any of the brutality that led to her conception, and she didn't see Boyse fly into the black hole to become spaghettified. For her, flying through a black hole isn't necessarily a death sentence. It's a journey into an unknown world. 

Monte knows better. He's seen what happened to Boyse. But he also understands that he and Willow don't have any good options. Yet he also doesn't tell her about what the black hole will do to them. For Monte, it's preferable to allow his daughter to believe in something good. As they fly into the black hole, Monte takes Willow's hand and savors his final moments with the only person he loves — it's the ending Tcherny wanted but couldn't have. 

"High Life" ends without showing Monte and Willow being stretched into spaghetti. That leaves open the possibility that they don't "die" in the traditional sense. Flying into a black hole only looks like spaghettification to an outside observer, and Monte and Willow (and Boyse) might well still exist in some form in some kind of alternate reality. It might not be likely, but it's about as hopeful an ending as you can get in a movie as bleak and disturbing as this .

If you or anyone you know has been a victim of sexual assault, help is available. Visit the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network website or contact RAINN's National Helpline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).

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Common sense media reviewers.

Pattinson stars in disturbing, violent, profane sci-fi tale.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

A second chance can be used to seek redemption.

In sexual environment, one character uses abstinen

Violence is bloody, disturbing. Several rapes, one

A nude woman explicitly masturbates on a Sybian sa

Extremely strong, frequent language includes "bitc

Men donate sperm in exchange for pill that will ge

Parents need to know that although the Robert Pattinson sci-fi drama High Life is being pitched as a story about a father trying to survive with his daughter in space, it's really about how they got there. Murderous criminals are "recycled" into a crew of astronauts on a research mission; one goal of the…

Positive Messages

Positive role models.

In sexual environment, one character uses abstinence as form of control. He's the calm force, clear thinker in the chaos. But he's no role model. A few people within group of criminals use their second chance to seek appropriate redemption.

Violence & Scariness

Violence is bloody, disturbing. Several rapes, one of which is very brutal; one takes place while victim is drugged to sleep soundly. Fight with broken glass, a couple of murders with blunt instruments. A woman's head is pressurized and explodes. Men punch women in the face on several occasions. Fingers are sliced open. A woman calmly details how she wants to beat up another woman. Hostile, angry interactions and moments of rage.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A nude woman explicitly masturbates on a Sybian saddle (a device made to facilitate female masturbation). Women and men are shown completely naked. Camera lingers on baby girl's genitals while she's receiving a bath. A woman douches. Close-ups of dripping postcoital bodily fluids, menstrual blood, lactating breasts.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Extremely strong, frequent language includes "bitch," "bulls--t," "c--kblock," "d--k," "piss," "p---y," "s--t," and "f--k." A man gently talks to a baby using profanity. Middle-finger gesture. Crude sexual dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Men donate sperm in exchange for pill that will get them high. A woman is referred to as a crackhead; a flashback shows her dirty, acting bizarrely.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that although the Robert Pattinson sci-fi drama High Life is being pitched as a story about a father trying to survive with his daughter in space, it's really about how they got there. Murderous criminals are "recycled" into a crew of astronauts on a research mission; one goal of the mission is to procreate in deep space. The result is a crude, profane, violent film that aspires to be high art but is more a collection of things you wish you could unsee. It creates a highly sexual environment in which everything about reproduction is cold, clinical, and icky. French director Claire Denis viscerally attacks the audience with shocking rapes (brutal and drugged), dripping bodily fluids, and a never-ending scene in which a completely nude Juliette Binoche masturbates on top of a sex chair. Other disturbing scenes include murders with blunt instruments, a woman's head exploding, and more. Language is constant and extremely strong, with many uses of "f--k," "s--t," crude sexual terms, and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (26)
• Kids say (3)

Based on 26 parent reviews

Absolutely Not- TW and child pornography

Space smut you do not want to share with your kids, or probably anyone., what's the story.

In HIGH LIFE, a space mission with a crew of convicts turns to chaos, leaving Monte ( Robert Pattinson ) struggling to survive outside the solar system while raising his infant daughter.

Is It Any Good?

No matter what anyone might say, there's not one good reason to see High Life -- and a thousand reasons not to. It's a film that loves its contrasts: pensive, stagnant cinematography drenched in production design (think dead bodies vertically floating through space like silent sheet music); soft-spoken dialogue embedded in stillness set against images of blood and death. Writer-director Claire Denis makes it clear: This is art , and if you don't like it, there's something wrong with you. But you're more likely to end up feeling like there's something wrong after you watch the entirety of this film.

The characters are society's worst, and they act out their worst instincts: fighting each other with punches to the face, shovels to the head, and shards of glass ripping through the skin. Not gross enough? How about watching someone's head slowly explode? Or a woman get repeatedly punched in the face while raped in front of her restrained, screaming friends? Film is a medium that allows viewers to see, feel, and experience situations they might otherwise not, and Denis' intention seems to be to provoke the audience far out of their comfort zone. A teen experiencing her first period in front of her dad, images of dead dogs and children -- it's all intended to be a beautiful horror show. Perhaps it's all set in space to demonstrate that nothing is more alien to us than human behavior, but, to what end?

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what they believe the writer-director's intent was in creating High Life. Is there a message?

Cruelty is a theme in the film. How is cruelty displayed? Are criminals deserving of treatment similar to the cruelty they exacted upon others?

Monte says that he finds power in abstinence. What does that mean in this case? On the other hand, his other companions show that sexual frustration leads to violence -- do you think that's true?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 5, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : July 9, 2019
• Cast : Robert Pattinson , Juliette Binoche , Andre Benjamin
• Director : Claire Denis
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : A24
• Genre : Science Fiction
• Topics : Space and Aliens
• Run time : 110 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : disturbing sexual and violent content including sexual assault, graphic nudity, and for language
• Last updated : February 9, 2024

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'High Life' Ending Explained: Robert Pattinson Jumps Into the Unthinkable

In Claire Denis’ introspective sci-fi, social norms come into question in a story about what makes us human.

In the final moments of Claire Denis ’s introspective sci-fi drama High Life , Robert Pattinson ’s criminal-turned-astronaut-turned-dad Monte and his teenage daughter, Willow ( Jessie Ross ), come across a spaceship identical to the one they are in. The only difference is the number on the ship’s carcass, which indicates that it left Earth after Monte’s mission. Adrift for many years — decades, even — Monte decides to board the ship in the hopes of finding someone to guide them home or any other kind of assistance. From their own ship, young Willow watches through a screen as her father climbs on deck to find not a human crew, but a pack of semi-feral dogs, some of which seem to be long dead. It’s a shocking, heartbreaking scene that echoes Monte’s own backstory. It also fits like a glove in this dismaying tale that asks hard questions about what makes us human, and how much of our humanity actually remains in the face of progress and extreme adversity

Originally released in 2018, High Life is Denis's first English-speaking film. Written by Denis and her long-time collaborator Jean-Pol Fargeau , the film follows a father and daughter duo struggling to survive in a derelict spaceship, identified only by the number 7. Or it tells the story of a group of prisoners turned into astronauts through a strange sentence commuting program. Both synopses are equally true, and the one you choose depends exclusively on how much of the plot you are willing to share. Despite having a pretty straightforward plot, including a scene in which a professor ( Victor Banerjee ) explains what is going on to an audience surrogate, High Life can also be a hermetic film at times. Some viewers were particularly puzzled by the ending, from the dogs sequence to the very last scene of Monte and Willow talking to each other after flying into a black hole.

High Life begins with Monte running around the spaceship, performing various maintenance tasks by himself while trying to take care of Willow (played as a baby by Scarlett Lindsey ). From his voice-over as well as pieces of his one-way conversations with the child, we begin to understand the precariousness of their situation. Despite still receiving televised images from Earth, they have lost all contact with their home planet. Some visual clues also help us paint a bigger picture: the bodies kept in cryogenic state indicate that Monte and Willow were part of a larger crew; the disposal of the bodies into outer space tell us that the ship’s systems are failing and can’t sustain life for long. Monte’s decision to dress them up in spacesuits before throwing them out shows that he cares for them and hopes against all hope that they may still survive. These scenes are intertwined with shots of two children and a dog playing in an earthly forest. They seem to be memories of Monte’s previous life, but it’s hard to tell for sure.

RELATED: The Best Space Movies of the 21st Century (So Far)

Until, of course, the aforementioned professor reveals to us the nature of Monte’s mission, and the film cuts to the past, to a time before Willow was born. One of the kids playing in the flashbacks was indeed Monte, who killed his friend with a rock for considering her responsible for the death of his dog. He’s been imprisoned since childhood and, alongside other convicted criminals, has agreed to participate in an expedition to try and harvest energy from a nearby black hole. It’s a suicide mission, but they don’t know that. Likewise, they are unaware that power harvesting isn’t the research’s main concern, even if it might be an advantageous outcome. The real goal, the film tells us verbally, is to assess how great levels of radiation impact the human body. However, the fact that the ship was meant to lose connection to ground control from the get-go suggests that the mission’s purpose is simply to rid Earth of undesirables.

Nonetheless, Monte, Tcherny ( André 3000 ), Boyse ( Mia Goth ), and the other crew members follow their directives regularly. Most of them also comply with the research conducted by the de facto captain of the ship, a doctor named Dibs ( Juliette Binoche ). Convicted for the murder of her husband and their two children, Dibs inseminates the women of the ship with the men’s semen in order to produce a baby that will be able to endure the black hole’s high radiation levels. Only two people refuse to participate in her project: Boyse, who douches to eliminate the sperm injected by Dibs, and Monte, who adopts a monastic lifestyle.

Despite being an extremely sexually charged movie, High Life has no sex scenes. It is implied that the ship’s crew is forbidden from having sex with each other, even for procreation. The only intimate contact they have with one another is through violence. To satiate their sexual desire, they have access to an intricate masturbation device dubbed “the fuckbox.” In this scenario, Dibs uses sex as a way of exerting power over them, mainly by breeding them like livestock instead of allowing them to reproduce naturally. However, Denis also shows her as a “tease,” seducing members of the crew and subsequently denying them sex. Using the drugs to which she has access to, Dibs also rapes Monte while he is asleep to collect his sperm and injects it into an unconscious Boyse. From this non-consensual union, Willow is born.

The birth of Willow is both preceded and followed by the “death” of most of the ship’s crew. The quotation marks, here, are used because, due to the cryogenic process, it is unclear whether those that died aboard the ship actually passed or were merely put on stasis until they could be healed of their injuries or diseases. Still, two extremely important deaths do take place before Monte is left alone with Willow. The first one to go is Boyse, who hijacks one of the ship’s pods and flies it into the black hole, dying of an exploded head. The second is Dibs, who locks herself out of the ship after being severely injured.

Being able to make choices, to have control over our bodies and what is done to them, is an essential part of being human. Whenever our autonomy is put into question, whether by imprisonment or the restriction of reproductive rights, it’s as if our own status as humans is put into question. Thus, both Monte’s monastic abstinence and Boyse’s obsessive douching are ways of showing agency and control over themselves. Likewise, the two suicides are desperate attempts at exerting autonomy in a situation in which you have no say over any other aspect of your life.

This is one of the reasons why the discovery of the dog ship is so impactful to Monte. Upon coming aboard, he realizes that they had as much choice in accepting that mission as those dogs: like the animals, they didn’t know what they were doing and were left to fend for themselves. Furthermore, the number 9 on the dog ship’s carcass indicates that it left Earth after Monte’s crew; that is, after Victor Banerjee’s professor made his speech about the inhumanity of sending prisoners to die in space. Much like Monte when he killed his childhood friend, the researchers responsible for the mission put the lives of animals over human lives — namely, the lives of incarcerated humans.

However, these are not the only issues brought forth by the discovery of the dog ship. While the population of ship number 7 dwindled, the pack of feral dogs continued to reproduce. There are puppies among them, possibly feeding on the corpses of those that died. Unlike humans, dogs have no concept of cannibalism or incest. They don’t understand the notion of taboo, which Monte tries to impart to his infant daughter in the first few minutes of the movie through the example of eating feces and drinking urine.

Monte knows that, in order to keep life going in the spaceship — to make human life abound just like the vegetation from the ever-growing garden — he would have to violate one of humanity’s most essential taboos. And, unlike his decision to join the black hole mission, this is a choice he would have to make knowingly. Before disappearing into the darkness, Dibs informs Monte of Willow’s parentage, making sure that he will never be able to claim ignorance. This is why, when recording his journal entry after disposing of the cryogenically frozen bodies, Monte states that he is well aware of the implications. It is also why the shot of Willow having her first period is so important, and why Monte is so hopeful when they find ship number 9. He’s not only looking for help and supplies, but for a community in which he and Willow can assure the continuation of human life without committing incest. He’s looking for a way to remain human, adhering to the rituals and laws that guide human society. Instead, all he finds is the reaffirmation that, at least in that corner of space, he is the same as an animal.

In the very final scene of High Life , Monte and Willow fly another one of the ship’s pods into the black hole, dressed in their space suits. Then, the image fades to black, and we see a brief exchange of words between Monte and Willow in which he asks her if she is ready, and she agrees. Credits roll as a song by Tindersticks featuring vocals by Robert Pattinson himself plays, with very suggestive lyrics: "Willow, are we rushing forward, are we standing still? (...) Willow, do you feel the sun upon your back? A lover's hand. Breath. An abyss." It’s a dubious ending that, much like the song that accompanies it, can be interpreted both literally and figuratively. One way of seeing it is that Monte and Willow followed the same path as Boyse, killing themselves to retain what makes them human — in their case, the taboo of incest instead of autonomy. However, it is also possible to construe the flight into the black hole as an acceptance of their fate, of the fact that, to keep life going, they will have to give in. It’s a jump into the unthinkable, and there’s no knowing what lies on the other side.

Screen Rant

High life's weird, frustrating & brilliant ending explained.

High Life sees Robert Pattinson grapple with parenting and black holes. We look at what makes the frustrating movie so powerful.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for High Life .

Legendary French director Claire Denis makes her English language debut with High Life , a startling sci-fi drama starring Robert Pattinson - here's what its ending means. When celebrated international directors make the jump to working in the English language or fully embracing the Hollywood machine, the results can vary wildly. Last year, Cannes favorite Jacques Audiard made his American debut with The Sisters Brothers , a Western that did well with critics and was embraced in his native France but flopped big time at the box office. Others, like John Woo and Paul Verhoeven , have become more defined by their glossy English language efforts than the work done in their mother tongues. However, there may be no English language cinematic debut as feverishly anticipated by film lovers as that of Claire Denis, and she’s done it with a sci-fi drama that has proven to be one of the year’s most intriguing titles.

High Life is Denis’ fourteenth film as director over a career that’s spanned three decades and a multitude of styles and genres. Having gotten her start as an assistant director for the likes of Jim Jarmusch and Wim Wenders (she is credited on both Wings of Desire and Paris, Texas ), Denis made her directorial debut in 1988 with Chocolat , a drama inspired by her own childhood growing up in colonial French Africa. Since then, she's refused to be boxed in and has adapted her style and ideas to suit a multitude of stories. She's made romantic comedies ( Let the Sunshine In ), erotic horror ( Trouble Every Day ), family drama ( 35 Shots of Rum ), noir-inspired thrillers ( Bastards ), and much more.

Related: High Life Review: Robert Pattinson Gets Lost in Space

As such, Denis can be a tough director to categorize, but through it all, she remains fascinated by topics of isolation, desire, and the unnerving sensation that comes with being an " other ". Even at her most frustrating, Denis' work is never anything less than completely fascinating. And such is the case with High Life and its ending.

What Actually Happened In High Life's Story?

High Life will inevitably be the first Claire Denis film many English language audiences see, simply because it’s not in French. As such, it comes with certain expectations to be “accessible” or to act as a gateway to Denis' back-catalog. In reality, it’s a much trickier title to categorize. It embodies all those themes that Denis is so interested in dissecting, but it also completely rejects any and all Hollywood-esque notions of appealing to wide audiences. It may a science-fiction film, one released at a time where that genre has never been more beloved or profitable, but High Life 's goals are far loftier and unafraid to make viewers deeply uncomfortable.

The film stars Robert Pattinson (once again reminding audiences that, post- Twilight , he has become one of his generation’s best actors) as Monte, a criminal who has been sentenced to service on a space mission to extract energy from a black hole caring for his daughter Willow. He, alongside other prisoners (including Mia Goth and Outkast's André Benjamin), are treated as guinea pigs by Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche). She has become obsessed with creating a child through artificial insemination, although all of her efforts have failed so far, until Willow. The non-linear narrative jumps around from Monte's childhood (and the incident that saw him receive a life sentence) to the chaos on the ship to his isolated life raising the baby Willow.

What Is High Life's Ending Really About?

However, breaking High Life down in terms of plot does it a great disservice. Denis is far less interested in the how of this narrative than she is the why of it all. The film opens with Monte and Willow alone on the ship and the events that led to their isolation are peppered throughout, building the overwhelmingly unnerving sense of dread that dominates their lives. We see Monte doting on Willow, teaching her words like “taboo” and finding peace in this isolation, then we jump back to the building madness that decimated the ship’s crew. Moments of parental warmth, like Willow’s first steps and Pattinson singing her a lullaby, are disturbed by the shock of her conception and the people driven to madness by one doctor’s obsessive pursuit of Willow’s creation.

High Life is a film of extremes, from the familial sweetness of Monte and Willow to the invasive horror of sexual assault. High Life ’s unflinching depiction of rape and reproductive coercion has proven to be some of its most troublesome aspects for many viewers, and part of what makes watching it so frustrating. In one of the film’s most striking and mind-boggling scenes, Dr. Dibs pleasures herself on a machine designed to masturbate the crew-mates, bluntly titled “the f*ck box”. Sex is stripped of its intimacy and inter-personal contact and reduced to a clinical activity aided by foreboding chrome black machinery. The f*ck box is a place of oblivion, much like sex itself in the context of the story, an apt metaphor given the ship’s ultimate mission towards the black hole.

What Happens in the Black Hole At The End Of High Life?

High Life ’s depiction of a black hole already seems ahead of its time; as many critics and scientists have already noted how much Denis' take looks like the ground-breaking image taken by the Event Horizon Telescope that was revealed to the public last month. Denis compared it to "a crocodile eye" and it's certainly an unforgettable image, both beautiful and utterly terrifying. The second half of the movie jumps forward further in time to show Monte with a new adolescent Willow as the pair move closer to the edge of space and the unknown of the black hole. Willow, now old enough to talk back to Monte and demand a say in how things are done on the crumbling ship, convinces her father to board an escape pod with her and journey through the black hole.

The climax is one of the most visually astounding moments of the year on film: a minimalist take on the wonders of space that is both beautiful and utterly horrifying. It’s also maybe the most striking and blunt cinematic metaphors for parenthood of the past decade. Being a father, Monte realizes, is a black hole of uncertainty with no clear route through to the other side, but if you pull it off then the results can be truly wondrous. Whether or not Monte and Willow make it out of the black hole alive is almost irrelevant. Even Denis herself doesn't know or care about the secrets of the black hole or what it holds for her protagonists.

Speaking at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, Denis mused, "What is nothing, when there is no time and no space? I don't know." The power of High Life is in the risk that they take. In their final exchange, Monte asks Willow, "Shall we?" She responds with a "Yes." The world is uncertain but they, in their bonds of love, are not, and that’s what makes High Life one of the best films of 2019 so far.

NEXT: Robert Pattinson Read Christopher Nolan's 'Unreal' Script in Locked Room

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“High Life,” Reviewed: Claire Denis’s Disappointing Journey Into Space

By Richard Brody

What made Claire Denis’s great 2017 film “ Let the Sunshine In ” (released in 2018) so thrilling was the sense that the director, at seventy, had launched herself in a new direction and discovered new ideas—ones that would be as fruitful for herself as they would be inspiring for other filmmakers. But beware the pet project: with the involvement of the high-profile actor Robert Pattinson, Denis was then able to make her new movie, “High Life,” which she’d had in mind for fifteen years, and it lets those ideas drop. Set in an indeterminate distant future, mainly aboard a spaceship on a mission beyond the solar system, “High Life,” for the most part, reflects Denis’s settled habits, and in the process it displays complacencies and assumptions that turn the film’s handful of audacities against it.

“High Life” is an intergalactic “ Lord of the Flies ,” a story of social breakdown among a group of marooned and isolated outcasts. But, where William Golding’s novel showed ordinary children’s moral deterioration, Denis’s film (which she co-wrote with Jean-Pol Fargeau and Geoff Cox) is also a prison movie, a drama of convicts whose efforts at redemption come largely to grief. Facing either life imprisonment or the death penalty, a group of prisoners, young adults, have accepted a virtual suicide mission—to ride a vessel into a black hole, in the hope of harnessing its energy for Earth—as an alternative punishment. The group features two officers, about a half-dozen rank-and-file participants, and one intermediary, Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who sees to their health while also administering sedatives and other pharmaceuticals that help to keep order.

The drama is centered on the tension between Dibs and another participant, Monte (Pattinson). Monte abstains from the ship’s masturbation chamber—or “fuck box,” as one participant, Tcherny (André Benjamin), calls it—which the others use, and he consistently rejects Dibs’s candid propositions for sex. Dibs, too, is a convict. She admits to having killed her children (smothering them) and her husband (stabbing him); she attempted suicide, mutilating her lower stomach, and now has what another participant, Boyse (Mia Goth), calls a “plastic pussy.” Now, aboard the spaceship, Dibs is obsessed with reproduction, harvesting the men’s semen from the fuck box and implanting it into the women, in the hope of creating a baby in space.

Denis constructs the story out of sequence; the movie begins with Monte raising an infant, a girl he calls Willow (played by Scarlett Lindsey), alone in the spaceship, and flashbacks depict the voyage that led to his paternity and their isolation. (Others show the crime that Monte committed back on Earth: he killed a girl with a rock, in a dispute over a dog.) From the start, it’s clear that the others are gone, and the flashbacks construct a sort of “And Then There Were None,” to show how the others died—and how Willow was conceived. The answer: Dibs pharmaceutically knocks out Monte, rapes him, collects his sperm, and implants it into another woman.

There are hints, early in the film, of space madness and solitary delusion, as Monte, talking to himself, maintains the basic systems of the vessel, and, alone with the infant Willow, speaks to her in a monologue that veers toward the obsessional. Declaring a plan to “jettison needless weight,” he drops the cryogenically preserved bodies of his colleagues out of the ship and into space. There’s also a hint of his paternal intentions, when he sews a small fabric doll for Willow. But hints are all there are. Because what “High Life” reveals of Denis is that she’s essentially a conservative filmmaker, not politically but aesthetically.

“High Life” is as scripty as a Hollywood drama, as rigidly determined as a television series, in which the images merely illustrate the details that are planted there to offer ready explanations or easy narrative rhymes. Monte’s memories recur throughout, but without a free play of memory; his mind neither wanders nor explores nor slips—it corresponds, as if his unconscious were a writers’ room that winks with portentous irony. Changing a panel outside the spaceship and staying in audio contact with Willow, Monte loses his composure when she cries and he drops his wrench into space—which triggers a memory of dropping a rock into a well (it’s the weapon with which he killed the girl). When Willow pokes a scar on Monte’s arm, he recalls the bleeding cut being stitched up by Dibs (the story behind the cut turns up only later in the film, in another quick flash). Later, when Willow is a teen-ager (played by Jessie Ross), Monte, having once killed for a dog, encounters another space vessel that’s filled with dogs, but he refuses to let Willow have one.

There’s peculiarly little physical process involved in Denis’s drama—her images break events down to their salient narrative details, as in the stage-managed fight scenes in superhero movies. She shows little interest in how things happen, in the incidental aspects of the events she depicts; she wants her points to be made without the distractions and loose ends that make for the fullness and the ambiguity of experience. (For that matter, the movie’s dialogue is largely expository.) The science-fiction world-building of “High Life” has some fascinating details dropped in, such as how the vessel’s velocity, near the speed of light, both creates gravity and contracts time, so that the voyage—planned to be eight years, though running somewhat longer—represents many more years on Earth. (The voyagers have reason to believe that their families and friends back home are long dead.) But the interest of this setup makes for only a few lines of dialogue and one fine moment where Monte, seeing a dim video transmission from a sunny beach, is aware that the scene is a tantalizing and poignant trace of a vanished world.

Such moments are exceptions; for all its action, “High Life” induces information hunger, because of the static way in which it drops its bits of narrative and bits of background together. The film’s intricate time scheme—framed by Monte’s raising of Willow (here, too, only in salient details) and then his bonding with her as an adolescent—far from rendering the movie complex, makes its parts fit together with a numbing facility. It’s as if the events of the film are excerpts from a master script emphasizing the most apparent and foregrounded relations that are then softened with impressionistic images, stamped with mood-stoking colors and music, and fraught with a slowed-down pace of action, to render simple actions portentous.

Many of the scenes in “High Life” depend on intimate physical action (scenes of injury, of violence, of lifting and dressing bodies). But they are filmed in ways that convey them as abstractions rather than concrete processes. Bodily fluids—blood, sperm, breast milk—are seen throughout the film, but they remain present as principles of the prisoners’ overheated, cooped-up, distorted existence, a carnal counterpart to the ship’s high-tech mechanisms and its captives’ mission. The movie’s details and themes remain theoretical, a blurred thesis about crime and punishment, about incarceration and isolation, about the occulted oppressions and subjections on which society depends. Only one scene, an already much-celebrated one, has both an air of abandon and a sense of discovery. It shows Dibs in the fuck box, straddling a metal dildo that rises from a clinical table, and its effect emerges as much in the sensual athleticism of the scene itself as in an extraordinary line reading by Binoche, when Monte scoffs, “That doesn’t seem to do you much good,” and Dibs responds, sharply, “Better than you think.” Yet, even there, the clipped montage of the moments leading up to Dibs’s erotic experience and fantasy eliminate the banal, even potentially comedic, mechanical aspects that risk breaking or foreclosing the mood. The point of the scene, as notable as it is, overwhelms its realization.

“Let the Sunshine In,” which also stars Binoche, was no less sensual, no less erotic—and, at least in terms of mental life, no less hermetic, in its tunnel view of the Parisian art world. But, as written by Denis and the novelist Christine Angot, that film’s copious, florid dialogue pressed it into a place-rooted, time-bound continuity—a sort of architecture, apart from the story and the psychology of character, that sometimes heightens and sometimes contrasts with the immediate and piercing intensities that Denis draws from it (with the help of Agnès Godard’s seemingly tactile cinematography, and the alert impulsiveness of Binoche’s performance). In “Let the Sunshine In,” Denis manipulates the element of time freely, playfully, audaciously. She seems to live the movie in real time; its ideas emerge from that experience all the more thrillingly. In “High Life,” with its lack of observation, not even the ideas remain—only their residues do.

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By Alice Gregory

Unsung Hero Review: Uplifting True-Story Drama About a Budding Singer Will Inspire Families Everywhere

The real-life Smallbone family moved from Australia to the U.S. in search of the American dream. Bring tissues, even if it all gets a tad cheesy.

• Joel Smallbone plays his real-life dad, David, in Unsung Hero , wearing his dad's jacket from 30 years ago.
• Smallbone's remarkable performance will floor you, along with the convincing supporting cast. A family of Aussies with Grammy winners.
• Unsung Hero balances faith and grounded drama, exploring the Smallbone family's struggles before achieving stardom. A heartwarming family flick.

In Unsung Hero , Joel Smallbone plays his own, real-life dad as he parents the child that would become, well, Joel. He even wears his dad's authentic jacket during the film from 30 years ago. Take that, Hollywood multiverses! Smallbone's remarkable turn as his dad, David, will simply floor you. The rest of the cast is pretty darn convincing, too.

It's a family of Australians, and if you haven't heard of the Smallbone family, maybe you've heard of either Rebecca St. James or the Christian pop duo for KING & COUNTRY. Said musical artists are biologically related — and both are Grammy winners, while we're on the subject. Years earlier, they were economically struggling young kids whose jobless dad took the riskiest of risks in emigrating from Down Under to the U.S. with hopes of starting anew.

The rest is history, as one of the kids is ultimately discovered for having a remarkable singing voice. But the road to discovery isn't always easy. When Unsung Hero doesn't lean into occasional overt cheesiness, you might just have a grand ol' time rooting for the Smallbone family on the big screen, especially if you're surrounded by friends or family during the viewing experience. It exists in a similar vein as the terrific Ordinary Angels , which is equally emotional for a PG movie. A family-friendly double feature should be in order down the line, if you have enough tissues.

Unsung Hero

• Solid performances by Joel Smallbone and Daisy Betts
• Supporting turns by Lucas Black and Kirrilee Berger also great
• Not too heavy on faith-based
• Falls into traditional family-friendly cinema tropes too often
• Too heavy on cliched musical score, when thumping soundtrack isn't involved

A Balance of Faith and Grounded Drama

Some terrifying movies have emerged out of Australia in recent months, such as You'll Never Find Me and Monolith , but Unsung Hero is a far cry away from that kind of dark subject matter. The only scares here are the fear of failure. You don't have to be an Aussie to relate to David's palpable struggles of career woes and everything tied to finances.

You might wince at his wretched face when he returns home after a long day to an epic surprise birthday party thrown by his wife, seven kids (yes, seven), and his own parents (one of whom is played by Lost star Terry O'Quinn , donning a makeshift accent here). Oh, and the icing on the cake: Wife Helen ( Chicago Fire star Daisy Betts) is pregnant! Gosh, what is David to do? Some of us can't even afford to support one kid in this day and age, let alone almost 10.

Unsung Hero is being marketed as a faith-based film, but how you perceive religion shouldn't be a dealbreaker in deciding which seat to fill at the cinema this weekend. The power of faith certainly plays its part in helping the Smallbone family hold on and never give up, but the movie succeeds by exploring the practical ways in which they get by before ultimately achieving stardom.

What Is Going on With Chicago Fire Firings and Hirings?

Once they set up shop in a rundown house in rural America, for example, a chance run-in with neighbors leads to the Smallbones doing yardwork and cleaning homes for profit until David can re-establish himself as the somewhat successful music promoter he once was. One home they stumble upon for cleaning happens to belong to famed musician Eddie Degarmo (Jonathan Jackson), who David subtly keeps tabs on. Maybe one day, a business deal can blossom...

The Realities of Aiming High

But until then, the Smallbones visit the local church, where they meet priest Jed Albright ( Friday Night Lights star Lucas Black, shining in a role he was born to play) and wife Kay ( Full House star Candace Cameron Bure, certainly looking the part). This sort of local power couple will simply warm your heart — and then drive you mad, when the stubborn David often refuses their help by letting his pride get in the way. That includes when Helen finally gives birth and spawns a $6,000 hospital bill. Soon following is a remarkable scene where David gets in Jed's face after learning Jed secretly paid the bill to help them out. It's tense, grounded moments like these that help boost a traditional family flick.

Best Movies with Religious Themes, Ranked

Unsung Hero also proves Joel Smallbone can carry a film, in addition to his successful real-life music career as one-half of for KING & COUNTRY. The film's uplifting excitement kicks into high gear when Joel's sister Rebecca (played well by young Australian-American actress Kirrilee Bergee) accidentally lets the community know that her singing voice is simply remarkable. Berger is a star in the making, with a real-life music career budding as well, and it's gripping storytelling seeing her and dad David trying to navigate the U.S. music scene down South.

Another standout performance from Joel Smallbone comes when Rebecca is struggling to find representation, and David (played by Joel) is losing hope, so he tries to give his daughter a reality check by shouting "You will never be enough!" This is perhaps a manifestation of his failed dreams , something many of us can perhaps relate to. Sure, Unsung Hero is a family film, but it's not all smooth sailing along the way. Yes, some corny cinematic tricks could have been dialed back, but Unsung Hero is an inspiring, harmless little song & dance.

From Lionsgate, Unsung Hero is now playing in theaters.

• Cast & crew

After graduating from high school without any plans for the future, Isaiah receives a push to start making better life decisions. After graduating from high school without any plans for the future, Isaiah receives a push to start making better life decisions. After graduating from high school without any plans for the future, Isaiah receives a push to start making better life decisions.

• Alex Kendrick
• Stephen Kendrick
• Karen Abercrombie
• Priscilla C. Shirer
• Ben VanderMey

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘High Hopes’ On Hulu, A Jimmy Kimmel-Produced Reality Series About A Marijuana Dispensary Trying To Go Corporate

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Comedic reality shows operate more like sitcoms than reality shows. Shows like Duck Dynasty, for instance, don’t pretend that what’s in front of the camera is just happening naturally; there’s some manipulation there, even if it’s just via casting more than anything else. A new comedy reality series from Jimmy Kimmel takes place in a Hollywood cannabis dispensary that’s trying to go corporate, despite being full of employees that, well, work in a cannabis dispensary.

HIGH HOPES : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.” We see a view of residential neighborhoods, then the camera zooms down to a nondescript house. An alarm goes off; a man wakes up and immediately rolls and lights a joint. He even smokes in the shower.

The Gist: High Hopes is a reality series that mostly takes places at MMD Hollywood, the flagship location of the MMD chain of cannabis dispensaries. The chain started in 2006 when weed was only legal for medicinal use in California — the name “MMD” stands for “Medical Marijuana Dispensary — and only took cash. Owners Slava and Mishka Ashbel talk about those early days, when they were so clueless they didn’t even realize they should buy a safe for all that cash until they got robbed one day.

Now, with recreational cannabis legalized in California and many other states, MMD has been looking to not only become more of a professional, corporate organization, but they want to expand into other markets. Some of the people who work at the store, near Hollywood Boulevard, are on board with this, like the very professional assistant manager Morgan, but others aren’t ready for MMD to become, like, a real job, man…

One of those people is Uriel, who has worked there in various capacities — “He’s fucked up every job possible,” says Mishka — and when the brothers introduce Uri to the cameras, they admonish him for eating behind the register. Still, he’s family, and if the brothers ever fired him, their father, who owns a big stake in the company, would just hire him back.

There’s also the super-handsome “budtender” Jared, who’s got rizz, as the kids say; he wants to be known for more than his looks, but he has a natural charm that keeps customers coming back. The brothers have been hiring new people to meet increased crowds; the dude we saw smoking in the shower is Freddie, whom the brothers (and the show’s producer) recruited when they saw him in a news report about the lines outside a new Michigan dispensary. They loved his stoner vibe and easygoing manner, and we see him on his first day at the store.

They also bring back Dani, who used to work for MMD as a budtender in the “old days”, and has always been a “pain in the ass” to the brothers. But she’s also an amazing salesperson, so at this juncture, the good with her outweighs the bad.

In the first episode, Slava tries to tell Uri that he can’t get high before work anymore. At the same time, the brothers want to throw him a surprise birthday party, and Mishka asks his girlfriend/assistant Sumi to plan it. He sends Dani to their house to help Sumi, but Sumi gets annoyed when Dani insists that they hire a masseuse, despite the fact that it’s going to be a room full of people who are going to be busy smoking weed.

Jared and Dani give the shy, awkward Freddie some tips about flirting, and Freddie joins Uri and the brothers at the corporate headquarters for a “Buyers’ Club” meeting, where they sample new products. Yes, that means they are allowed to get stoned at work in this instance.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? High Hopes is a funny workplace reality series in the same vein as Pawn Stars or Comic Book Men .

Our Take: Jimmy Kimmel is one of the executive producers of High Hopes , which should tell you all you need to know about how serious the show is. Its showrunner/director is Ben Steinbauer, a documentary filmmaker best known for Winnebego Man , and he also fully admits that they were going for funny situations with this show. The staff is an amalgamation of people from various stores in the MMD chain, and Steinbauer and the Ashbel brothers recruited Freddie specifically for the series.

The idea that MMD is trying to go corporate when pretty much all the employees are anti-corporate types is where the comedy lies in this show, along with the on-the-street interviews with people who talk about getting high. As much as the Ashbel brothers try to make MMD a “serious” company — they hired a former Jamba Juice executive as their CEO — employees like Uri and Dani are always going to march to their own beat. And, let’s be honest: How corporate do you really want to be when you end up hiring a guy like Freddie, who is essentially a real version of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo ?

Uri and Freddie are the show’s breakout stars, though Dani will have her moments; as MMD decides to roll out their own cannabis brand, Dani will do the same, despite the conflict of interest. But for pure comedic purposes, we’ll be watching the show for Uri, who will try everything he can do to keep MMD weird, and Freddie, who is a funny guy with a unique vibe who is so not Hollywood, which makes him fit in with this group of “misfit toys” perfectly.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: “I was beyond surprised,” Uri says about his birthday party. “My birthday was a month ago.”

Sleeper Star: Mishka fully admits that he and Sumi “don’t make sense on paper,” given that he’s overweight and smokes weed and she doesn’t smoke at all and works out. But that “opposites attract” vibe works for this show, because Sumi might really be the only adult in the room with most of these people.

Most Pilot-y Line: There is lots of footage of “the old days,” which leads us to believe that this isn’t the first time the Ashbel brothers have tried to make a reality show.

Our Call: STREAM IT. High Hopes is funny enough and has enough quirky characters to keep viewers entertained. It’s definitely something you can watch while waiting for your gummies to kick in, that’s for sure.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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