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.
Because rest assured, Clapin is playing the premise of Meanwhile on Earth entirely straight, really inviting the viewer to consider the emotional and spiritual cost of trading these lives, watching as the human consciousnesses are repressed and segmented off into a waking dream state while the alien intelligence takes over their bodies. Elsa is being asked to very likely destroy any potential that remains in her own life in order to achieve this goal, with only faith in an unknown voice to drive her, a promise that she cannot possibly trust.
On a technical level Meanwhile on Earth is a triumph, with engrossing photography from DP Robrecht Heyvaert, who finds moments of serene beauty in mundane places, coupled with animated sequences that evoke Clapin’s own I Lost My Body. These black and white animated segments, drawn from Elsa’s notebook of drawings inspired by her brother’s journey into the cosmos, provide a lovely stylistic counterbalance to the live action that add a brooding sense of wonder and metaphor to the film. Seemingly inspired by the futurist cartooning of the likes of Mœbius, the animated portions are used to evoke conversations between Elsa and Franck as she mulls over the cursed labor with which she has been charged. Fantastical visual transitions and some sparse but extremely effective special FX are used in swapping between the animated and live action sequences, suffusing the film with a distinctly creepy, momentous energy. There’s a feeling of stillness, of waiting for pent-up potential energy to be unleashed in a cataclysmic way. The score from French indie rocker and multi-instrumentalist Dan Levy amplifies this sense of gathering foreboding, swinging between delicate and grandiosely dramatic. It all builds tension that can reach rather terrible heights as Elsa weighs her choices.
This building storm is beautifully contained within a wonderful performance by emerging star Megan Northam, whose unique, striking face recalls something akin to a younger, blonde Sofia Boutella. Clapin’s screenplay doesn’t quite give her time to really, fully confront the horrors of her choices, but both her grief and her horror is etched in Northam’s expression as she commits to the dark path and then faces an increasingly desperate and dangerous road to its completion. It’s a very assured performance for a young actress without prominent lead credits to her name, particularly given that she spends much of the film with an acting partner that is primarily a voice in her head.
At its best, Meanwhile on Earth reflects the uncommon blend of beauty, horror and poignancy that viewers might have felt while being absorbed into the lushly realized alien world of a sci-fi series like Scavenger’s Reign, but the comparison can’t quite hold through the entirety of its runtime. That is because the conclusion of Meanwhile on Earth takes a somewhat unfortunate turn for the opaque and noncommittal–particularly frustrating given that the entire story that precedes it largely refrains from being so willfully obtuse. I’d love to hear Clapin flatly state his interpretation of how the story ends, but I can’t imagine he ever would–instead, he’s created an ending that will inspire some wildly different takes from viewers who have vastly different views as to what exactly happened in its closing moments. Each viewer will no doubt choose to take their own meaning from it, and firmly believe that their own reading is the “correct” and obvious one. And what you believe about the events of the film’s conclusion will ultimately have a profound effect on how hopeful, devastating, healing or crushing you interpret it to be. Would that the writer-director could have made a more concrete choice of his own, but he elects the veiled route instead.
Ultimately, the ambiguousness of the conclusion can’t really dim the engrossing and nigh-mystical sense of enrapturement that Meanwhile on Earth can project when it’s really firing on all cylinders. Like I Lost My Body, it marks Clapin as a filmmaker of rare power, one who is making cinema that probes at the weak points of the human psyche, looking for the fault lines and cracks as he questions what really makes us human.
Director: Jérémy Clapin
Writers: Jérémy Clapin
Stars: Megan Northam, Catherine Salée, Sam Louwyck
Release Date: Nov. 8, 2024
Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.