By Elias Savada.
For Elsa, her E.T. essence in her head never offers up an origin story or a political agenda, and this ambiguousness pushes the question – is this a cosmic lifeline or an invasion?”
Leave it to the French (and writer-director Jérémy Clapin) to fashion this moody, low-budget, medium-concept, not-quite-nailing-it art house exercise in DIY interstellar communications. A galaxy — perhaps far, far away, or not — contacts Elsa Martens (Megan Northam), the despondent 23-year-old sister of Franck (Sébastien Pouderoux), an astronaut apparently lost during a space mission a year earlier. His bronze memorial statue, erected in the town where she lives with her parents and pre-teen brother, is a soulful reminder that his inspirational presence is gone but not forgotten. A grave without a body.
While crawling through her extended despair one night, the young woman, intrigued by a hilltop marker, a weird bass rumble, and an unworldly swirl of dust, forges a telepathic portal to someone/something who appears to be her brother. Instructed by Franck’s voice (and then apparently a female leader – for a small group of desperate, non-corporeal extraterrestrials), the woman places a gooey “seed” in her ear that acts as a truly long-distance ear pod. Unfortunately, that device morphs into something more foreboding that Elsa expects. The film is a small-scale variant of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Elsa plays a frustrated version of the Kevin McCarthy/Donald Sutherland character, with the handful of her victims (who become vessels for the aliens) being replaced by seemingly mindless pod people. For Elsa, her E.T. essence in her head never offers up an origin story or a political agenda, and this ambiguousness pushes the question – is this a cosmic lifeline or an invasion?
The film dabbles with a plot, but leaves it to Northam to take a bold approach to her character, a wannabe comic book artist on leave from her studies to cope with the family grief. Taking up nursing duties at the geriatric facility run by her mother (Catherine Salée), she becomes so self-absorbed in her morally questionable plight that she drives herself into a state of frantic desperation as she reckons with the demands from the voices in her head. She is helpless to fight back, as her pain sensors become play toys for the eavesdroppers, should she even think of disobeying their requests. It is a most interesting emotional spiral, supporting her vestigial hope is that Franck will somehow return home in the end.
While Clapin can easily handles the directorial skills here, the screenplay could have used some work, especially how it fails to tie things up. The filmmaker plays better when his characters are rendered on a cartoon palette, as in his 2019 feature debut I Lost My Body, which was an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Feature. Some scenes in his sophomore effort are animated, but they only help differentiate the past (black-and-white, Academy-ratio aperture, blurred sidelines) from the live-action wide screen present.
Setting the film’s darkness in a science fiction package, and tossing in some chainsaw-assisted, blood-letting melodrama, belies the sense of melancholy that permeates the work as Elsa selects the folks who the aliens need to move their consciousnesses to Earth. “We only need five,” the voice says ever so humbly. Yeah, we’ve heard that before.
Like I Lost My Body, in which a dismembered hand is seeking out its body, Meanwhile on Earth imagines that appendage as Elsa, and its main part as the missing brother. Each film is seeking re-attachment to a norm, and both have finales that leave it to the viewer to figure out.
Elias Savada is a movie copyright researcher, critic, craft beer geek, and avid genealogist based in Bethesda, Maryland. He helps program the Spooky Movie International Movie Film Festival, and previously reviewed for Film Threat and Nitrate Online. He is an executive producer of the horror film German Angst and the documentary Nuts! He co-authored, with the late David J. Skal, Dark Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning (a revised edition in paperback is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press).