Claire Denis’s “High Life” is bizarre, beautiful and at times extremely frustrating. There are aspects of this film that are thought-provoking, but I often found myself bored and in disbelief of what I was seeing.

For one thing though, I really enjoyed the way the movie began and ended. I think the father and daughter relationship is quite interesting and complex, especially when the baby we first meet becomes a teenager. Pattinson and Jessie Ross really sold their relationship to me. Their relationship is not like a father and daughter relationship back on Earth, though you can see the similarities, you can very much also feel the space between Ross and a teenager back on Earth. That Denis can strike this difficult cord of making us understand this relationship, imbuing it an eerie yet also heartwarming feeling, is quite impressive.

What really gave me pause was the middle of the film. There is a lot of explanation that is given in the middle, even for things that don’t need to be explained. Whereas the beginning and ending of the film are more abstract. Fusing these both together in this way makes for a frustrating film because it keeps switching modes and some things I would’ve liked to have explained don’t get explained and things I didn’t need explained get explained. For example, there is a scene where Pattinson puts the dead crew members in space suits and throws them off board in order to shut the cryogenic sleep chamber and reserve energy. But what was the point of putting the bodies in space suits if you were going to throw them off board anyway though? Or take some of the deaths that happen, some of them are very clear and others are not. Andre 3000, for example, just lies down in the garden and then we fade to a mound of dirt in the same place, what exactly happened there?

And then there are aspects that are explained, which just didn’t need to be there. For example, we meet this Assamese Professor who tells us of the dawn of the Kali Yuga, where people are lying and cheating each other all the time, and pondering the ethicality of the prisoners in space, yet we never see him again and the information that he gives is revealed later by one of the crew members anyway. If you had taken this entire scene out, it wouldn’t have made a difference in the film. Maybe Denis was trying to portray how people back on Earth think about the prisoners in space, but it isn’t well developed enough to bring out anything meaningful and it needlessly provides exposition where there didn’t need to be any.

I’m all for a Denis choosing to reveal what she wants to and what not to, but I was frustrated by what she revealed and saddened at what she choose not to. The film’s visual imagery is startling and beautiful, the film has the capacity to speak for itself but it is marred by inconsistent storytelling.

There is a great scene near the end of the film where Pattinson encounters another vessel filled with dogs. Previously, we had learned that he was convicted of murdering his friend over a dog. Denis bringing this idea around in the end is absolutely brilliant, and the conversation that he has with his daughter who wants to keep one of the dogs is absolutely fantastic and one of the best moments of the film.

Pattinson also does a fabulous job, he is truly an incredible actor and I loved his scenes with the baby. I thought they were extremely heartfelt yet haunting considering that they are both hurtling towards a black hole, to an unknown future.

The scenes with the inmates though, I couldn’t really care about. The whole idea of sending inmates to space in order to get information from a black hole is extremely silly. Which I guess is the point Denis is making, especially about prisons, like who would consider it a good idea to confine murderers in one place and ask them to behave?

Then there is the whole artificial insemination experiment, which was quiet interesting and unexpected; however, this is also where the film gets quite bizarre with the introduction of “the fuck box”. Certainly the scene with Binoche in “the fuck box” is one of the craziest things I have seen this year, but all of this is making it sound more interesting than it is.

“High life” certainly has its moments, and it surprisingly comes together in a meaningful way despite what I mentioned above, but I wouldn’t go out of your way to see it.