MEANWHILE ON EARTH - Mark Reviews Movies

Meanwhile on Earth, Metrograph Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2024

Writer/director Jérémy Clapin's Meanwhile on Earth puts forth a tricky and troubling moral question. What is the life of a loved one worth? We often don't think of this in a practical way, because, of course, someone a person genuinely loves is worth more than anything in the world, but here, the concept does become a tangible thing. Is a brother's life equal to the life of another person? Is it worth two people or more? Where does one draw the line?

The reason that question arises in this story becomes the stuff of science fiction, because the brother in question is an astronaut, who went missing in space about a year prior during a failed mission. That has left his younger sister Elsa (Megan Northam) without much to do but grieve, put off her plans for own future, and wait around home, spending time with her parents and young brother, while perhaps hoping—somewhere in those unspoken thoughts that the seemingly impossible might actually happen—that her beloved brother Franck will return.

Everyone else has moved on, with a statue in Franck's memory built at the center of his hometown. Elsa hasn't.

That's the relatively grounded setup to this story, which quickly reveals its main gimmick—involving an alien life form that makes an offer to the mourning young woman—and, from there, the real conundrum of deciding what sacrifices Elsa is willing to make for the chance of Franck's return. It's a good idea for both a story and an ethical debate, but Clapin seems in a rush to get to the point—so much so that the emotional core of his tale never quite forms.

Indeed, we barely meet and get to know Elsa, who currently works at a hospice facility while she indefinitely delays going to art school, before the conceit emerges. She has a complicated relationship with her mother (played by Catherine Salée), who's also her boss, and a pleasant one with her father (played by Sam Louwyck), although he spends most of his time in his basement office away from everyone, and one with her younger brother (played by Roman Williams) that mostly revolves around talking about Franck. Elsa and her elder sibling were close, often staring at the stars and imagining what wonderful things they could do with their lives. Franck went off and did them, and Elsa put those dreams into comic books she would make.

While looking at the stars at her and Franck's usual spot, Elsa notices an odd vortex of sorts. When she steps into the swirling wind, the sounds of the world disappear, and her brother's voice (provided by Sébastien Pouderoux) fills her head. He's fine enough, Franck's voice says, but he doesn't know where he is or how he could return to Earth. Franck then explains that someone—or something—else wants to talk to her with the help of a strange, glowing plant growing near the vortex. Elsa shoves it into her ear, and that's when another voice (provided by Dimitri Doré) takes over the conversation.

That voice belongs to an alien entity and demands compliance, sending a screeching static sound into Elsa's head and threatening Franck if she doesn't do what the alien asks. Initially, it tells Elsa to follow a specific path through the woods outside town, but soon enough, it's telling the woman that it will release Franck if she finds five people whose bodies can be inhabited by itself and its companions.

The fact that all of this happens under extraterrestrial duress, of course, makes the moral question at the center of the movie both trickier, because we're never sure what the aliens' plans with those human bodies are, and simpler, since Elsa is basically acting with metaphorical guns pointed at both her and her brother's heads. The setup here is a bit too convoluted for Clapin to really get at the ethical problem this situation raises for Elsa, but it'll do.

That's especially true as Elsa does start to do the equation of whose lives might be worth sacrificing in exchange for Franck's. One of them isn't even a choice for her, since that swap happens before Elsa even knows what the stakes and terms of this hostage negotiation actually are. It's ultimately irrelevant to the conflict, since Elsa does have choose everyone who will be possessed by an alien, while their consciousness is sent to a sort of dreamlike purgatory, after that. Still, Clapin does undermine and diminish the problem a bit in his haste to get to the premise.

Elsa's actual process of selecting victim, though, is cold, calculating, and pragmatic in unsettling ways. She has to gauge a lot of considerations—who might be missed and what kind of a life isn't as important as her brother's—and work out the logistics of getting people to go into the woods. Clapin's screenplay might cheat its premise and add a few too many complications, including a ticking countdown, for actual story to hold up to scrutiny, but the air of mystery, dread, and unthinkable moral compromise on display here is palpable, regardless.

Still, it's not quite enough for Meanwhile on Earth to really achieve what it's attempting. It's the story of a very specific kind of moral question, but the story also raises so many other questions about itself that we never feel the impact of Elsa's quandary.

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