Meanwhile on Earth opens in theaters November 8.
The average science-fiction protagonist doesn’t know they’re a science-fiction protagonist, but Meanwhile on Earth’s Elsa (Megan Northam) might be more attuned to her role than most – even without breaking the fourth wall. The sister of an MIA astronaut, she often fantasizes about joining her brother, Franck (Sebastien Pouderoux), on his outer-space voyages. So it’s somewhat startling (and a little implausible) how quickly she stuffs an object of otherworldly origin into her ear in this lo-fi chin-scratcher from France. She has her reasons: She’s been out partying, and also Franck’s disembodied voice told her to. And she is, it bears repeating, the main character of a sci-fi movie – one that’s about to turn from its cosmically contemplative opening chapters toward a ramshackle series of events that threaten to overwhelm both Elsa and director Jérémy Clapin.
The voice in Elsa’s head is key to Clapin’s live-action follow-up to his Oscar-nominated animated feature I Lost My Body: Elsa misses Franck, and she’d do anything to reconnect with him. Grief makes us do strange things, and in Meanwhile on Earth, grief is an alien intruding on Elsa’s thoughts with promises to bring Franck home… but only if Elsa keeps up her end of a devil’s bargain.
The problems with Meanwhile on Earth begin after Elsa dons the Earbud from Beyond the Stars. Though this decision leads to some spectacularly repulsive body horror, it also kicks off a plot that’s packed with ideas and tones that Clapin only kinda sorta manages to balance. As Elsa acts on the instructions of the beings seemingly responsible for her brother’s disappearance, the director flirts with touches of slasher films and philosophy 101 exercises while mixing in images that are genuinely majestic (rows and rows of swaying evergreens) and unsettling (a hanged man, out of focus and deep in the shot). And by initiating a story where poor, unfortunate souls are lured to their doom for ambiguous extraterrestrial purposes, all while the woman at the center of the movie is haunted by an unknown figure on a motorcycle, Meanwhile on Earth comes perilously close to ripping off the reigning queen of abstract, 21st-century sci-fi creepshows: 2013’s Under the Skin.
Even before Elsa submits herself to the commands of the unseen, all-knowing intelligence that colonizes her head, she’s already under the influence of forces beyond her control. As depicted through Northam’s effectively contained performance and the somnambulant haze that Clapin, cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, and composer Dan Levy cast over Meanwhile on Earth, she’s an aspiring artist in thrall to her grief over the loss of Franck. In one of his more direct bits of symbolism, Clapin shows Elsa’s day-to-day routine revolving around her hometown’s monument to its fallen hero, which his own sister regularly drives by.
These are the slices of life that settle us into Elsa’s post-Franck existence, which she spends trudging between a nine-to-five at a nursing home and the house she shares with her mother, father, and younger brother. The low lights and lower spirits of the place suggest a family that’s going through it, as do the animated interludes where Elsa escapes into a black-and-white space opera where she – or, rather, her antennaed avatar – can still be by Franck’s side. (These scenes and a couple of innovative effects shots are where Meanwhile on Earth really blares, “LIVE-ACTION DEBUT BY AN ANIMATOR WITH AN ACADEMY AWARD NOMINATION!”) But Meanwhile on Earth is engaged in its own trudge, too. It’s around the 20-minute mark that fantasy collides with real life and Elsa is shaken from her sleepwalk with the sound of Franck’s voice; by the time she’s fully confronting the interplanetary trolley problem her new overlords have sucked her into, there’s only 30 minutes of movie left.
Thank the stars for Megan Northam, who demonstrates the levels of intensity, vulnerability, and completely over-it-ness necessary to keep this often-wild and uneven ride somewhat on the tracks. It’s a demanding role – with big emotional swings and numerous scenes of the actor carrying on a conversation with no visible scene partner – and Northam is never anything short of convincing in it. As Elsa sketches the people around her moving on with their lives or dances by herself at a house party, Northam is the picture of alienation. When Elsa is forced to defend herself after her first assignment from the aliens goes awry, the actor’s blood-splattered glower makes her a dead ringer for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.
If only this terrific performance were in a movie with less on its mind and more profound things to say. Meanwhile on Earth revisits themes of disconnection that ran through I Lost My Body, though the conclusions Clapin draws here about coping with and putting an end to such feelings fall shy of award-worthy. The audacity sometimes on display – Elsa’s attempt to get this thing out of her head might be the worst thing to happen to an ear in a sci-fi movie since Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan introduced us to the Ceit eel – can’t quite square with a message that boils down to “Let go, and find a little ambition.”
