This is purportedly a science-fiction film in English by a French production team led by director Claire Denis. I say purportedly because Denis has no background in science-fiction and it seems clear that she’s not about to start here. The setting is a mere backdrop for the same kind of sexually-charged psychological horror that the director habitually indulges in. I’m irked by how little respect is accorded to the practical and technical details of the space mission and also very disturbed by the implied reasons for why the main character survives.

Though the events are depicted out of order which makes things a little confusing, we soon realize that this film is about a ship sent on a long-term mission to attempt to extract energy from a black hole. As this is a one-way trip, the crew is composed entirely of convicted felons and their obedience is compelled by a system that threatens to shut off their life support if they fail to file regular reports. The only person in charge on board seems to be the doctor Dibs who is herself obsessed with obtaining a perfect baby through artificial insemination. The crew use a facility that they call the box to masturbate and work through their sexual frustrations, with the exception of Monte who chooses to abstain from all forms of sexual activity. Eventually as the crew members break down psychologically and physically, only Monte is left alive together with the one baby girl that Dibs manages to have another prisoner bring to term successfully.

I’m feeling resentful of this film because of how it uses science-fiction elements as background decoration but isn’t science-fiction at all. It seems that they called in some technical help as there are some high concept ideas in here like harvesting energy from black holes, but those are details that aren’t really relevant to the film’s themes. As such the film is entirely insouciant about the plausibility of sending criminals with questionable technical skills on a presumably expensive space mission, how such a small ship can be expected to be self-supporting for decades even if it has a garden on board, or why order on the ship didn’t break down immediately after launch given that the means to enforce any kind of discipline seems so weak. Eventually the film veers off into pure fantasy-land and abandons any pretense at being science-fiction with its escapist ending.

Instead this is yet another film in which Denis explores her real interests: sexual perversion and its effects on the human psyche. Sensuousness is the focus of the camera, whether it is Dibs pleasuring herself with the enclosed device on the ship or the crew members enjoying the feeling of the grass of their garden on their skin. Sex is also used to control the crew, suppressing them with drugs and allowing them to release their urges in the box. Yet the film’s theme here seems to be that sexual desire itself is perverse and is the root cause of the crew breaking down. The other crew members deride Monte for being “celibate”, meaning that he refrains even from masturbating, yet he is the only one of them to survive in the end and Dibs praises him for his strong genes. Surely this angle feels terribly wrong and archaic in the here and now but I can’t see how this film can be interpreted any other way as Monte’s deliberate and conscious decision to be celibate is rewarded in the end.

What all this means is that this is a film that I dislike on multiple levels. It’s a film that has the superficial trappings of science-fiction but doesn’t really want to be one at all and as such doesn’t give much thought about how plausible its core premise. It’s take on sex is horrible with the most charitable interpretation being that this is an extreme scenario that arises only because of their total isolation in space. In the end, I’m not sure why Denis made this other than to shock the audience as much as possible.