How I love to discover hidden little gems like this dark comedy about a bunch if criminals. High on dope and low on IQ, high on aims but low on life, this film by Canadian director Gary Yates succeeds in being his most interesting so far.

With a serious undertone, still the main thing of this film is to entertain, but also gives a good glimpse into the everyday life of petty time criminals addicted to drugs. And entertaining it is, if you're not expecting too much of an action flick.

We meet Dick (Timothy Olyphant) and some of his bad buddies back in 1983, all dependent on drugs, and all except one, jail birds. Dick involves Bug, Don and Billy in a bank heist. Of course a very bad idea, with a very stupid gang, which has to go horribly wrong...

Well acted by all, suitable for such a comedy. A great and very suitable score follows the film throughout, adding to the pleasant watch. You might want more of the ending, but otherwise this does the job. You also might react to the cars being used in the film is very worn to be in the eighties, and the Mercedes used there didn't come into production until 1986. But that shouldn't ruin your enjoyment of watching this. It's not by any means a fast paced film, more slow, but relying in he acting. Nice little film!

After I watched this film, I checked out the trailer for it on the DVD. The trailer makes High Life look as though this is some sort of action thriller. What it really is, however, is a low wattage, dark comedy about 4 junkies on various stages of the junkie evolutionary scale that succeeds by never asking for any sympathy or understanding for its characters, only that you be entertained by them.

Dick (Timothy Olyphant) is a scruffy morphine addict and ex-con working as a hospital janitor in 1983 when his scruffier, sullen and violent ex-cellmate Bug (Stephen Eric McIntyre) shows up. Bug quickly gets Dick fired but Dick doesn't hold it against him at all, which tells you a lot about both men and their relationship. With no work and no prospects and a horse that shows up in the middle of his rundown apartment, Dick comes up with a plan for a big score. It's so big, he and Bug can't handle it alone, so they've got to recruit Donnie (Joe Anderson), a sickly addict who's developed a scam where he steals people's wallets and uses their ATM cards for easy money before putting the wallets back, and Billy (Rossif Sutherland), another addict with the looks of a high school heartthrob and the good luck to never have gone to jail.

Dick's big plan revolves around the repairmen who service ATM machines and it actually seems like a decent criminal idea, until it goes wrong from the very beginning and launches Bug into a shooting spree and leaves Dick covered in pink dye, waiting for the cops to show up.

The most interesting thing about High Life is the picture of junkie society it paints. Dick is a high functioning drug user that the others cluster around and unthinkingly look to for leadership. They all consider him smart, but Dick's brain is pretty well fried. All he can do that the others can't is think farther than 5 seconds ahead. A step down from Dick is Billy, who is the sort of addict that's cruised through life without anything all that terrible every happening to him. He's physically and mentally unscarred but his lack of suffering has left him incapable of taking anything seriously, even his own impending death. On the next lowest rung is Donnie, the meek little petty thief who's just going from hit to hit with no thought of the future. At the bottom is the tough but emotionally fragile Bug, who can't even function in normal society, though it's not at all clear whether his drug use has anything to do with that. The way these four men fit together in an informal social hierarchy is kind of fascinating, all the more so when drastic changes in fortune make all of Bug's weaknesses into strengths and turn all of Dick's advantages into drawbacks.

This is also a consistently amusing movie. It may not be laugh out loud funny but it you can't smile at stuff like Bug asking Dick about mutual friends, only to be told they're all dead and that Bug killed one of them, maybe you need to get high on something. Timothy Olyphant is delightful as a guy who used to be smart and now rummages through the drug-addled remains of his brain for inspiration. Stephen Eric McIntyre also does a very good job showing how Bug's temper and lack of forethought go from flaws to advantages based on the situation.

High Life is a nice little piece of work. It draws humor and a bit of humanity out of the harshness of life, without getting too full of itself or expecting its audience to care more than they should. This is worth watching.