Starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche, it focuses on a group of criminals sent on a space mission toward a black hole while taking part in scientific experiments.

Physicist and black hole expert Aurélien Barrau was hired as a consultant, and Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson designed the film's spacecraft.

The ship is equipped with "The Box", a device in a small room that is obsessively used by the crew to masturbate, while Dibs administers sedatives to the passengers.

The shuttle travels through a molecular cloud that alters its trajectory and causes it to dive into the black hole, where Boyse dies gruesomely due to spaghettification.

No longer wearing space suits, Monte takes Willow's hand, and they walk together to a yellow light source that grows ever larger and envelops them.

[10] Denis went to the European Space Agency's Astronaut Centre in Cologne to learn about human spaceflight exploration before the film started shooting.

[11] Denis explained the practical reasons for the non-linear story, saying "I always wanted it to start with a man and a baby, as a ritual of two living persons with no despair in that moment.

During the project's early stages, Denis had Vincent Gallo in mind for the lead role,[7] and wrote the film thinking of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

[…] It's strange, though, because it would be difficult to imagine anyone more unlike Philip Seymour Hoffman physically, but Robert is very enigmatic, with a powerful presence.

[8]Pattinson described his character as an astronaut and said, "He's a criminal who volunteers for a mission toward a black hole, but he realizes along the way that a doctor on board also wants to do sexual experimentation with humans in space.

Pattinson asked a favour of Lindsey's father to cast her in the film, which he described as a "massive gamble" that was ultimately paid off by her "incredible" performance.

The website's critics consensus reads, "High Life is as visually arresting as it is challenging, confounding, and ultimately rewarding – which is to say it's everything film fans expect from director Claire Denis.

[28] David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film an A− grade, saying it owed more to Solaris than Star Wars and describing it as "a pensive and profound study of human life on the brink of the apocalypse.

[30] Charles Bramesco of the Guardian gave the film 5 stars out of 5, saying Denis had reconfigured the genre's "familiar components to create a startlingly fresh engagement with the question of what it means to be human.

"[31] Steve MacFarlane of Slant Magazine wrote: "The 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.