78
Metascore
42 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 100The GuardianCharles BramescoThe GuardianCharles BramescoWith an achievement of this calibre it’s hard to resist hyperbole: High Life contains the single greatest one-person sex scene in the history of cinema.
- 100Screen DailyAllan HunterScreen DailyAllan HunterHigh Life offers an uncompromising mind-bender of a deep space journey through destructive desire, faith, trust and the instincts for good and bad that make us merely human.
- 100The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzThe Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzBy twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.
- 100The Film StageThe Film StageThe crew’s suffering is bleak and oppressive, but Denis invites us to witness it so that we truly understand the power of Monte’s conviction in his improvised mission...and Denis is so emotionally in tune with what that might feel like it becomes overwhelming.
- 91IndieWireDavid EhrlichIndieWireDavid EhrlichHigh Life is fixated on the hypnotic rhythms of oblivion, and the human desires it brings to the surface.
- 88Slant MagazineSteve MacfarlaneSlant MagazineSteve MacfarlaneThe film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.
- 80VarietyJessica KiangVarietyJessica KiangThis kinky, often grotesque melding of genre science-fiction with all-out body horror is an audacious project, but the scope of its ambition is cleverly reined in by the low-key presentation, its more salacious potential muted down to an insistent threatening hum, like the background radiation of Stuart Staples’ score.
- 75The PlaylistJason BaileyThe PlaylistJason BaileyHigh Life feels longer than it is, and is occasionally so squirrely that it becomes off-putting. But in spite of the aforementioned traceable connections, it’s a true original — sometimes strange, sometimes scary, sometimes kinky.
- 60The Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerThe Hollywood ReporterJordan MintzerWithout 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.