Extraterrestrial Drama Meanwhile on Earth Mesmerizes as it Confounds
Great science fiction filmmaking so often boils down to elemental, poignant themes on the nature of ethical choices and how these moments can transform our lives: Crossroads moments, where the paths of possibility diverge in opposite directions. Choose one path, and perhaps you retain your humanity at the cost of your own destruction, be that physical, emotional, spiritual or symbolic eradication. Choose the other, and perhaps you sacrifice your soul for some other aim, altruistic or personal. Is the choice worth the cost? In the end, we each must decide for ourselves, as protagonist Elsa (Megan Northam) is made to do in the emotionally wracking and visually engrossing new French sci-fi drama Meanwhile on Earth.
Elsa’s family, and by extension her own personal development, are both encased in a casket of grief, slowly suffocating as they linger in stasis. Three years earlier, her brother Franck disappeared during an exploratory space mission, his ultimate fate unknown but safely assumed by all. His small town in the French countryside erected a statue to their fallen local hero in the center of a traffic roundabout, which Elsa feels compelled to occasionally deface not in opposition to her brother but as a way to retain some kind of symbolic ownership of his memory. Her family unit is frozen in place: Father entombed in his basement office, listening to crystalline piano concertos, mother and daughter working at the same senior memory care facility, where they provide succor to patients who have outlived all other forms of familial aid. For Elsa, the job was supposed to be temporary, something to help keep her busy and get her back on her feet following the disappearance of Franck, before she returned to her true passion for illustration and comic book art school. But without Franck’s motivating presence, his ceaseless support and energizing drive, Elsa is now stuck in place, lacking the inertia to truly restart her life. And that’s about when she first hears a voice from above.
Although as anyone who sees Meanwhile on Earth will probably conclude, “above” is entirely relative in this equation. Where Franck and his spaceship have truly gone is an open question, allowing for the possibility that they have transcended time and space itself. And when Elsa begins to hear these voices, the implication is that she may be hearing them across the gulf of dimensional borders (if she’s not crazy), able to do so thanks to the opening of a fleeting “path” that only she can access, thanks to her emotional or psychic connection with Franck. But wherever he is, he’s by no means alone.
Meanwhile on Earth is the mournful sophomore feature from director Jérémy Clapin, and like his beautiful, Oscar-nominated animated debut I Lost My Body from 2019, it delves into metaphysical themes of identity, self-worth and compartmentalization: How do we value others, and ourselves? What are the individual parts of us worth, and which parts make a whole? Can a person be complete on their own, without the ones they love? The film’s basic premise forces Elsa into confrontation with one of the most elemental moral dilemmas of all: What is the value of a human life? And when it comes to saving the life of someone you love, how many other lives represent a sacrifice that you can live with? Call it a reverse trolley problem. We bear witness to how willing this woman may or may not be to damn herself in the hopes that her soul can be sacrificed for the sake of someone she values more than herself.
Because the voices Elsa is hearing–beyond the fleeting bits of contact she has with the voice of Franck–identify themselves as extraterrestrial intelligence. Aliens, if you will, or possibly interdimensional beings who have stumbled across Franck and are holding him in some kind of stasis. With Elsa’s help, the possibility exists that these aliens can all transport their consciousnesses to Earth, the ultimate prize being that they promise to be able to bring Franck back along with them. But the metaphysical “path” to do so is only open for the next few days, and these disembodied beings will need vessels waiting for them when they arrive. Vessels, as in living human bodies.
What we have here, then, is an elegiac sci-fi drama tinged with elements of both psychological thriller and body horror, a potent blend of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Under the Skin, if the latter was about a human avatar made to collect bodies for the aliens to inhabit. It’s a ghoulish concept, that Elsa will be forced to find five people, five consciousnesses full of hopes and dreams, to effectively sacrifice to these beings in exchange for possibly seeing her brother again, but at the same time Clapin’s well-crafted screenplay sows some level of doubt as to whether the intentions of the “aliens” can truly be labeled as purely villainous. They stress that their goal is not something so cliche as conquest but merely survival as they transition to a new dimensional medium, and they challenge Elsa’s assertions over the state of the power dynamic between them. The voice can read her thoughts, but not necessarily understand them all, lacking total human familiarity with concepts of emotion and responsibility, but it is coldly calculating and logical in its way. The whole thing plays like an elevated, serious spin on the parasitic hitchhiker in Frank Henenlotter’s 1988 absurdist horror comedy Brain Damage.