"High Life" is obsessed with sex in space, or the lack thereof. A bunch of convicts find themselves in a new sort of prison in a spaceship far from Earth. A mother and wife who murdered her family becomes a mad doctor obsessed with procreation and mating with another man. Actually, nobody has consensual sex, which seems to be banned for whatever reason, aboard the craft. Instead, they masturbate a lot, including for the doctor's collection of sperm in her ongoing in vitro fertilization experiments. Otherwise, there's celibacy and rape. There's a room onboard specifically designated for onanism, with one scene featuring the doctor straddling a dildo chair.

Images of space stand in as symbolic of a womb. There's a focus on fluids--semen, blood, water and such. Plus, there's the fertility of the garden. The picture begins with the reminder of the result of sex by way of scenes of an infant and her father. The backstory is filled in non-linearly later on, including that the rocketship is accelerating towards a black hole. There's no need to explain what the metaphor of that is. Hardly a need for the movie in general, either, which doesn't seem as interesting to me as it apparently does to some critics. The slow pacing and emptiness of space here merely seems to suggest a lack of anything compelling to move towards or to fill it with.

And the seemingly-random images transmitted from Earth remain baffling to me, including the early clip from "In the Land of the Head Hunters" (1914), although I don't recall any horses being in that film, which is why I first thought it was from some Thomas H. Ince silent Western. Regardless, at least, that offered some brief, as they say, "mental masturbation."

I really enjoyed this film, but I cannot imagine the average moviegoer would care too much for it. If you enjoy arthouse films, then you should probably give this a shot- it has some wonderfully meditative themes, some great performances, and a completely original story. But if you only go to the movies to see the latest Marvel flick, I can almost guarantee you'll think this movie weird and probably a little messed up.

I will never understand that camp of filmmakers who make their movies so off putting it's like they don't even want anyone to watch them. Then why make them?

"High Life" feels like a bunch of randomly connected scenes populated by actors performing by themselves that were then edited together later to make it look like they were all in the same movie. These people aren't characters, or at least not characters of any depth that we learn anything about or care anything for. The film is maddeningly obtuse, needlessly so. It's one thing to make an audience do some work in putting the pieces of a film together, but another thing entirely to make that task impossible because you don't give them enough information to do so. I was physically uncomfortable watching this movie, in that fidgety, squirmy way I'm uncomfortable when a movie is so tedious and boring that I'm struggling to pay attention.

And this movie has to have one of the most ridiculous masturbation scenes ever put on screen. I usually adore Juliette Binoche, but oh my goodness was she out of her depth with this one.

Grade: D