Mia Goth Brought Horror to Space With This Unnerving A24 Film

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Movie Features

Claire Denis may not ever have the broad, mainstream appeal of filmmakers like Greta Gerwig or Jordan Peele, but she certainly has been one of the most exciting directors working in Hollywood for several decades. Denis is a rare artist who seems completely unconcerned with the comfort of her audience. Her films are often challenging, bleak, and at times controversial. While her 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail is often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, her work within the subsequent decades seemed to cater exclusively to a niche audience of established fans. However, Denis was able to introduce her style to a generation of younger arthouse audiences with her mind-bending space film High Life. Although it's just as weird as anything else she’s ever done, High Life did feature a breakout role from Mia Goth.

While Goth is now a much more established star thanks to her collaborations with Ti West on the films X, Pearl, and MaXXXine, she was far less known back in 2018. Despite giving memorable performances in Nymphomaniac and A Cure For Wellness, Goth had yet to have a sizable role that indicated her unique talent for playing idiosyncratic characters. Given Denis’ reputation as an artist, and the stacked cast of High Life, it would have been easy for Goth to be a footnote in any mention of the film. However, Goth’s powerful performance helped High Life connect to deeper themes about victimization and maternity.

What Is 'High Life' About?

High Life is set in the distant future, where a group of former criminals are sent on a voyage into outer space to reach a black hole. Given that this sort of extended travel is inherently dangerous, no official governmental body wants to sanction a mission that could put “valuable lives” at stake. However, criminals possess a less risky prospect, so characters like Goth’s Boyse are more or less forced to undertake the assignment instead of being executed. Although living on a contained vessel filled with violent criminals is dangerous enough in its own right, High Life takes a step into body horror when the scientist Dibs (Juliette Binoche) begins performing a series of strange experiments.

Goth is able to perfectly convey the existentialist feelings of Boyse as she ventures on what is assumed to be a doomed mission. One of the most brilliant choices that Denis makes is never explicitly revealing what the characters did on Earth that warranted a sentence to outer space. Although it’s implied that their crimes were severe, Goth is still able to generate empathy for Boyse given the constraints of the mission. Boyse isn’t just punished for her mistakes, but used as a guinea pig to see what science is truly capable of. While not a traditional movie hero by any stretch of the imagination, Boyse has to fight for the right to receive a basic amount of respect. Goth is able to convey her feelings of distress whilst still presenting an aura of mystique around the character.

'High Life' Is One of Mia Goth’s Most Challenging Roles

Goth does a great job at delving into the feminist themes that make High Life such a bold work of science fiction compared to other films by male directors. Early on in the story, Boyse is nearly sexually assaulted by other members of the crew before her cohort Monte (Robert Pattinson) saves her at the last moment. Denis shoots the sequence in a way that does not attempt to appease the male gaze. The attempted abusers are seen as vile and animalistic, as they treat Boyse as nothing more than an object. Goth is able to show how this traumatizing experience affects Boyse for the rest of the mission, as she is constantly at odds with her fellow passengers. While there are moments where the entire team is forced to work together for the sake of their survival, Boyse collaborates with full knowledge that no one is interested in personally ensuring her safety.

Goth makes the maternal themes of High Life more effective, as the film steadily becomes a deep metaphor for parenthood and adolescence. Boyse becomes injected with Monte’s semen as a result of one of Dibs’ strange experiments, and is subsequently forced to raise the child as the ship goes deeper into the unknown. While Goth never lets the viewer forget that her body was violated, she does show a softness towards Boyse as her maternal instincts kick in. The relationship with Monte becomes a complex one; while neither of them chooses to be co-parents, they’re forced to share responsibilities to protect the child’s safety.

Mia Goth Was Aiming for Roles Like ‘High Life,’ and Directors Like Claire Denis

Image via A24

High Life was the type of film that Mia Goth was looking to star in, as she underwent extensive work to flesh out Boyse's character. "I did a lot of research into juveniles and young people that had got sentenced to prison and watched a lot of documentaries and read up on it," she told SciFiNow in an interview, while also expressing her excitement to work with Denis. "I was so excited because this kind of project with a director like Claire, it’s everything I’ve ever been working towards, and it’s exactly the kind of thing that I’ve always longed to be a part of in every sense of the word." Goth's dedication shines through the screen in High Life, as her acting is immensely multilayered to the point where you almost forget that Boyse is a fictional character.

Goth continues to bring that type of dedication to every role, including MaXXXine and Infinity Pool; she credits her choice in film roles to the type of directors she'd like to work with. "Well, the director is first and foremost the most important element when I’m deciding which project to do next," she said while promoting Infinity Pool. "If you don’t have total trust in the person leading the ship, then there’s really not much point in being involved in a project." This mindset means she's worked with a group of talented directors including Denis, Brandon Cronenberg, and of course Ti West — and it's those kinds of out of the box choices that've made her a star to watch.

Mia Goth Is the Definitive Scream Queen of the A24 Generation

Goth showed a different side of her acting abilities in High Life, proving that she is one of the more unique scream queens of her generation. While X and Maxxxine required her to play confident, aggressive characters who are entirely certain in their identities, High Life showed that she could also play meek, more distressed roles. The dialogue in High Life is quite sparse, and often contains highly technical jargon about outer space mechanics that may be a barrier to entry for viewers expecting a more traditional sci-fi horror film, Goth was able to inject enough personality to make the story still feel emotional.

Goth’s career has been defined by making bold choices and taking on unusual parts. While some of her contemporaries may have balked at giving a wild, anarchic performance in Infinity Pool or playing a docile romantic lead in Emma, Goth has taken risks on performances that could have easily gone awry. The fluidity of her star power and the projects she’s been attached to speaks very highly to her future in the industry.

Why Is Cosmic Horror So Terrifying?

High Life is representative of the interesting fact that science fiction and horror tend to go hand-in-hand, and have been intertwined since their conception. Many of the earliest horror films from the Universal Monsters era, such as Frankenstein and The Invisible Man, were reliant on the use of futuristic technology to create ghastly creatures. Amidst the 1950s, there were many popular science fiction B-movies that examined the ways that technology and extraterrestrial life could be used to evoke primal fears; The Fly, War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Day the Earth Stood Still may be considered to be rather “cheesy” when compared to the blockbusters of today, but they were seen as far more terrifying when outer space was a completely unknown quantity. Much of the public perception of interstellar travel was based upon what they saw on television and on the big screen; it is worth remembering that the original Star Trek series began airing three years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission.

Space travel can be used as a particularly chilling subject because of the various anomalies that occur when venturing into unexplored territory. High Life latches on to these themes because the film examines what space travel would look like if humans were capable of conducting missions that spanned beyond the Solar System. One of the most influential films within this movement was 2001: A Space Odyssey, the masterpiece from Stanley Kubrick that has influenced dozens of filmmakers in the several decades since its initial theatrical release. The concept of losing control on a mission that is far removed from human civilization was utterly terrifying, particularly when matched with the sinister voice of the villainous artificial intelligence program known as HAL-9000. 2001: A Space Odyssey is not generally considered to be a horror film, but the intense psychedelic “stargate” sequence that ends the story was certainly an upsetting moment to witness given the era of its release. The trippy visuals that Kubrick perfected with the groundbreaking special effects are still influencing modern films, as even High Life contains a similar sequence in which the laws of gravity and nature appear to be inverted.

Cosmic mission films are often tied to elements of body horror, as mortal human beings go through intense physical changes whilst in space. One of the most upsetting concepts in High Life is the idea that even when humanity has advanced to the point of developing amazing technology, there are still issues regarding sexism and assault. It would be impossible to examine the history of science fiction and horror without referencing the original Alien, which successfully combined the primal terror of Jaws with the leaps forward in special effects made with Star Wars. Alien was groundbreaking for showing how a female protagonist attempted to survive when a predator stalked her, and attempted to find a victim in which it could birth an offspring. Sigourney Weaver’s performance in the original classic redefined what the “final girl” could be, as Ripley transforms from being a victim to an active hero when she faces off with the Xenomorph in the iconic final airlock sequence. It’s a performance that still resonates today, and it is hard not to see how it may have influenced the work that Goth does in High Life. At the same time, the Alien franchise also directly examines parenthood in a way that mirrors Pattinson’s character arc in High Life; in the sequel Aliens, Ripley becomes a maternal figure for a young girl after her family is killed by the Xenomorphs.