High Life

My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library. We had high hopes based on some DVD box comments but in the end we were disappointed. It wasn't a total loss but we got so little for the time invested.

As is explained in the DVD extras the writer/director does not like to spell everything out, she wants the viewers to extrapolate and interpret. As a result the movie is rather deliberate and not everything makes sense.

It is a space mission outside our Solar system, presumably to study reproduction during space travel and also to travel to the vicinity of a black hole to see if its energy can be harvested for Earth use. But to get there they have to travel for years at 99% the speed of light, communications with Earth no longer possible, and even if they were successful with the black hole how would the energy be transported?

So the science and physics is very shaky, however only there for a setting for the story, most of which is how a bunch of criminals would interact on a long, secluded journey if all their survivals depended on it?

The movie has some interesting elements but overall we found it to be a big miss, not worthy of the almost 2 hours to view it.