High Life (2018)

High Life is the kind of science fiction that feels less like a ride and more like a haunted poem drifting through the cosmos—strange, intimate, and quietly unforgettable. Claire Denis turns deep space into a pressure cooker for the soul, pairing hypnotically beautiful imagery with a raw, human ache, while Robert Pattinson anchors the film with a performance of bruised restraint that makes the silence feel loud. It’s bleak, sensual, and boldly unromantic about survival, yet there’s a surprising tenderness in the bond at its center that keeps the darkness from becoming empty nihilism. Fair warning: the film’s explicit sexual content and violence are integral to its unsettling vision, so it won’t be for everyone—but if you’re open to challenging, artful sci-fi that lingers in your mind like a fever dream, it’s absolutely worth the trip.

High Life is aiming for a grim, cerebral sci-fi poem about isolation, bodily autonomy, and what’s left of humanity when you strip away society, and Claire Denis commits to that mood with total confidence. The problem is it’s deliberately opaque and slow, often feeling more like drifting through unsettling images and ideas than following a story with clear momentum or answers. It also leans hard into explicit sexual material and violence, including sexual assault themes, which can feel punishing or gratuitous if you’re not on its wavelength. If you want conventional sci-fi thrills or tidy explanations, this will likely frustrate you, but if you’re up for an art-house descent into discomfort, Pattinson’s restrained performance and the film’s eerie atmosphere can be genuinely absorbing.