So this is a Claire Denis (who you might remember from such movies as Beau Travail or Let the Sunshine In) movie starring Robert Pattinson, but tbh it feels less like one of Denis’s other movies and more like the other recent movie that Pattinson starred in, The Lighthouse. (I’m going to be spoilery here on the assumption that you don’t want to watch this movie, because probably you don’t.)

Because so the premise of the story here is that in Earth’s probably dystopian future, a group of criminals is offered the chance to take a one-way suicide trip to a black hole that has some unique property for sciency reasons. Which means that you’ve got an enclosed, claustrophobic space full of irrational and violence-prone people in a setting that increasingly verges on the inhumanly surreal. So yeah, that’s a lot like The Lighthouse.

And then there’s the masturbation. Juliette Binoche’s character is a doctor who’s kindasorta in charge of the mission, but also is herself a criminal, and she’s obsessed with (as she says) “reproduction,” and doles out drugs in exchange for semen, which she then uses to try to impregnate the women on the ship.

She actually succeeds at one point, and now there’s a babby. After scenes in which the other characters brutally assault and kill each other, we end up with Robert Pattinson raising the baby by himself in this ship at the end of the world. (Actually, we start with this, and all the above is told in flashback.)

This is probably the most successful part of the film, the quiet everyday banality of a single father taking care of a baby, while also trying to keep a decaying spaceship in working condition.

But so anyway, at some point, the movie then jumps ahead some years, and the baby is now a teenager (she gets her first period, because there is not a bodily fluid this movie doesn’t delight in showing) and Robert Pattinson is older, and another ship is approaching, one just like the one they’re on, but with a larger number. Is it more people? What will that be like? Are they criminals, too?

So Robert Pattinson goes over to the ship, and… it’s like Bioshock over there, total chaos, and the only life he sees is some feral (and some dead) dogs, so he just comes back. Then the daughter implores him to take a journey with her to the black hole, which they do, and [insert your own interpretation of what happens here].

There’s definitely a lot of memorable scenes (like oh yeah I forgot to mention that Juliette Binoche also has the “fuck box,” which is her room with a sex machine in it, and there’s an elaborate artsy scene of her using that), and the movie captures a claustrophobic tense mood very well. But it feels more impressionistic than cohesive.

I’ve remarked before that SF movies exist on a continuum between dull prosaic literalness on the one side (like Contact) and trippy metaphorical/mystical experiences on the other (Solaris or The Fountain, say). This is way way way way way off on the trippy side.