Contemporary science fiction is obsessed with sterile, aerodynamic futures. Studios waste hundreds of millions on CGI to render spaceships that look like polished Apple products tumbling through the void. Claire Denis, naturally, rejected this entirely for High Life.
Creative Problem Solving: The Brutalist Aesthetic
Bref, Denis did not hire a VFX house to design her spacecraft. She hired Olafur Eliasson, the renowned Danish-Icelandic installation artist, to architect the vessel and its stark, psychological lighting.
The ship they built was not an elegant capsule, but a boxy, brutalist “goods crate.” This was a deliberate thematic choice, underscoring the reality that the prisoners onboard were not heroic astronauts; they were expendable cargo on a suicide mission.
The Tactility of Decay
C’est le génie de la matière. Production designer François-Renaud Labarthe built the practical sets with an unusual and striking amount of visible wood paneling in the corridors. This wasn’t merely an aesthetic flourish. As filming progressed, the wood physically warped and degraded, providing a tangible, organic metric for the passage of time and the decay of the vessel.
Denis even brought in physicist Aurélien Barrau to ground this surreal, tactile environment in actual science, particularly regarding the Penrose process of extracting energy from a black hole. In High Life, the horror of deep space is not found in aliens; it is found in the inescapable, rotting tactility of a wooden box.
Insights regarding Claire Denis’s collaboration with artist Olafur Eliasson and physicist Aurélien Barrau, as well as production designer François-Renaud Labarthe’s use of degrading wood paneling to emphasize the brutalist, box-like spaceship design, were compiled from a production overview on Wikipedia and a critical analysis in Film Comment.