high life (w&d claire denis, w. jean-pol fargeau, geoff cox, andrew litvack, nick laird)

High Life is unhinged in all the best senses of the word. Dennis throws whatever she can at the wall to see what sticks. The remarkable thing in this starry, high concept jamboree of a movie, is that she gets away with it. In part, it’s because of the Dennis trademarks of a vivid editing style, astute use of score and understated emotional output from the actors. However, there’s a flair to the lo-fi sci-fi which allows for the unlikely, somewhat Hollywood premise to remain convincing, despite the unlikely logic and the ghost of Solaris & 2001 which haunt any film set on a spaceship hurtling into the void. The use of flashback is as astute as ever, timelines criss-crossed like a cat’s cradle. We get into  protagonist Monte’s head via some subtle images from a long-lost earth. Robert Pattinson keeps a lid on the fireworks and allows a baby to steal his scenes, making for a compelling performance. Binoche is demented, showcasing another side of her spectrum altogether from anything seen in Assayas, as though glorying in the chance to get down and dirty. The highball mixture of weird sex, the inevitable heightened sexual tension, a Lord of the Flies meets Alien narrative, beautiful weird people on a train to nowhere, is juxtaposed with an unashamed sentimentalism, as Pattinson coos to his baby and later bonds with her as an adolescent. It’s a cocktail which really shouldn’t work, but gloriously does. 

evolution (w&d. lucile hadzihalilovic; w. alante kavaite, geoff cox)

I came out of a meeting and went into Evolution. I should have come out of nightmare and gone in to see it. There’s something other worldly about Evolution, not just in its supposed “mermaid horror” premise, but also in its pacing, sparse storytelling and medical porn scenes. I’d enjoyed Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s previous picture, Innocence, which had a similarly opaque, hallucinogenic quality. The world seen through a lens, darkly. This is auteur moviemaking: you come out of Evolution feeling like you’re stepping out of someone’s mind. Which is dangerous because you need to be in the right viewing space to appreciate it’s whimsical glory. I’m not sure if it’s because I went in with the wrong frame of mind, but I came out feeling a bit nonplussed. The concept of psycho-mermaids seemed more attractive in theory than in practice. Maybe that’s as it should be; maybe it was just that the repeated explicit operation sequences and injections meant that this notoriously squeamish viewer found himself coming in and out of the film from behind his fingers more often than was good for the narrative flow. It seems like a shame we have had to wait so long for Hadzihalilovic’s second feature to arrive; there’s a mesmeric quality to her filmmaking, even if I came out with the feeling that sometimes she might be stuck in her own shadow.