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FILM Courtney Byrne Hannah McKennett Jack O’Higgi
ns Shane O’Reilly David Turpin illustration Debbie Jenkinson High Life Director: Claire Denis Talent: Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, Mia Goth, André Benjamin Released: 10 May There is nothing to fear. Everything is going to be fine. – Dr Dibs, played by Juliette Binoche, perfects the role of the mad scientist in High Life, Claire Denis’s debut English language space feature. With this odyssey into deep space, the everarresting French auteur Claire Denis makes a characteristically singular English-language debut. Denis is often at her most discombobulating when flirting with ‘genre’ – as in her 2001 ‘horror’ film Trouble Every Day, her 2013 ‘noir’ Bastards, and her most recent feature Let the Sunshine In (2017) which was notionally a romantic comedy, albeit one that took its cues from Roland Barthes. High Life, for what it’s worth, might be called a ‘science fiction’ film, although it’s so thoroughly the work of its writer/director that the play of expectation and reward that constitutes ‘genre’ becomes largely irrelevant. The dependably adventurous Robert Pattinson plays Monte, who we first meet mending the hull of a boxy space-craft, somewhere deep in the void. It emerges fairly quickly that he and an infant child of unknown provenance are the last survivors aboard the craft – a revelation that comes with an indelible image of Monte releasing the corpses of his former co-passengers to drift silently into infinity. The rest of the narrative comes in fragments, many of which are disconcertingly shuffled in time. It appears that Monte and the other passengers (also including Mia Goth and an affecting André Benjamin) are/were death row prisoners, jettisoned on an experimental rendezvous with a black hole. Presiding over the mission is one Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who seems to have taken it upon herself to combine research into the infinite with rather more corporeal experimentation in the realm of human fertility. The role instantly catapults Binoche into the Woman at War Director: Benedikt Erlingsson Talent: Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir Released: 3 May Woman at War, directed by Benedikt Erlingsson, is an Icelandic film centring around an eccentric eco-warrior named Halla. Leading a double life as a music teacher and a menace to industrial corporations, Halla is determined to sabotage negotiations between the Icelandic government and a company preparing to build a new aluminium smelter. However, when Halla learns that her application to adopt a child has finally been successful she is faced with a crippling decision: should she continue to fight against the damaging of her homeland, potentially sabotaging her own happiness, or cease her efforts and be content to be a mother. With evocative cinematography, the film is masterfully shot by Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson, featuring striking images of Icelandic landscapes. However, Björgúlfsson may be guilty of being a tad too amorous towards a wide aperture – sacrificing potentially powerful shots for an excessively dramatic blurred background. With the score’s musicians featuring as interactive participants within scenes, Erlingsson evokes a sense of Wes Anderson-esque unreality. Unfortunately, such attempts at playfulness grow increasingly irritating as the film progresses, the intrusive musicians halting the flow of the narrative, and the percussion-dominated sounds reminiscent of drummers busking on Grafton street. Woman at War probes viewers to consider who has the right to decide the fate of the environment and should it be a criminal offence to defend it from destruction. Despite the plot revolving around environmental issues, however, the film does imbue the viewer with a sense of accountability. Either Erlingsson did not intend the film to be didactic, simply using global warming as a plot device, or he failed to make the issue salient. Woman at War is a playful depiction of one woman’s determination to defend her natural habitat from its demise, however, its integrity suffers in its attempts to be wacky and unconventional. HMK pantheon of cinema’s great mad scientists – not least for a truly startling auto-erotic sequence, and an equally memorable scene in which she harvests her charges’ sperm samples with a wry fascination that borders on the parental. This is Binoche in uninhibited form, squaring the circle between Huppert-grade icy hauteur, and Beatrice Dalle sex-witchiness. One might not expect it, given the circumstances, but she’s a hoot. Pattinson remains both a compellingly interior performer and a fascinating photographic subject. In a film largely uninterested in the conventional aesthetic pleasures of sciencefiction, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux creates a number of striking compositions using only the play of light on Pattinson’s profile, and the curved visor of his intriguingly low-tech spacewear. Meanwhile, the muted and quotidian vessel interiors – while evocative of a few forebears, particularly Solaris (1971) and Silent Running (1972) – give the film an entirely different visual texture to the generic chrome and gunmetal of much contemporary science fiction. The question of what High Life actually ‘means’ is open to debate – perhaps because, by placing human bodies in an apparently infinite space that is, in fact, a site of extreme restriction – Denis is staging a confrontation between humanity and the limits of the self that rejects conventional ideas of meaning or purpose. Ultimately, her film feels like the exhaustive proof of a thesis that is kept intriguingly out of reach. Like space itself, it draws the mind in precisely because it doesn’t seek to be known. DT Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile Director: Joe Berlinger Talent: Zac Efron, Lily Collins Released: 3 May When the judge sentenced Ted Bundy to death at his Florida trial in 1979, he named the serial killer “extremely wicked, shockingly evil and vile.” This is not a spoiler for Joe Berlinger’s 2019 film, which uses the same phrase for its title. In fact, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile is the story of a man who is, simply, quite the opposite. Played by teen heartthrob turned charming movie star Zac Efron, this Ted Bundy is more on par with a celebrity than a killer. When we first meet him outside of his prison cell, he is at a local college bar in Seattle, seducing his love interest Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) and the audience alike. Thus begins Berlinger’s attempt at a romantic comedy, in which we are wooed into believing – and rooting for – a man that is being investigated for the kidnapping and murder of multiple women. Throughout the story’s timeline, Berlinger thrusts us into the mindset of Liz and the rest of the people that knew Bundy before his sentence, suspending us in disbelief, doubt and, ultimately betrayal. He succeeds in showing us the charismatic and trustworthy Bundy (played expertly by Efron) that everyone around him saw – everyone, of course, except for his 30 (or more) victims. Because of this, the stories of the very real women that Bundy murdered are once again lost to a man preoccupied with his own narrative. In a culture that has become increasingly drawn to true crime, what with a buffet of viral murder podcasts and Netflix docu-series of which Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes is also directed by Berlinger, it is important to remember whose stories deserve to live on, and whose should be exposed for what they really are. HMK 76