In animator Jérémy Clapin’s live-action feature debut Meanwhile on Earth, Elsa (Megan Northam), sister of astronaut Franck (depicted by Yoan Germain Le mat, voiced by Sébastien Pouderoux), finds herself adrift and grieving after Franck becomes lost in space and presumed dead. She spends her time working at the nursing home her mother runs, floating about at clubs, hanging out with her little brother Vincent (Roman Williams), and keeping a sketchbook of some of the people she encounters. After she and Vincent spend some time looking at the starry sky one night, she notices that something is up with the old radio tower nearby. A strange energy surrounds it, and there’s a three-by-three spot beside it, which is sort of a dead zone. Bits of dirt and debris float around it in a circle, and when she steps into it, environmental sounds fall away to a muffled near-silence. Suddenly, she hears Franck’s voice, which speaks of a “they” around him, and references a “seed” near Elsa, that “they” want to use to speak with her. She finds this seed, a goopy and glowing AirPod-sized thing, and sticks it in her ear. After some gross body horror, Elsa learns from “La Voix” (voice-acted by Dimitri Doré) that the beings Franck spoke of are five aliens of some kind, La Voix apparently being their vocal leader, who claim they will return Franck to earth if Elsa will do something for them.
From there unfolds a science fiction thriller that treads very familiar ground but with some unique and personal touches. The most obvious point of reference is probably Under The Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), in which Scarlett Johansson’s “The Female” seduces men into being consumed in a black pool. Here, Elsa is coerced into facilitating a somewhat similar arrangement for the aliens, albeit with a more clear motivation of retrieving her lost brother, and with a more clear motivation for the aliens as well. So, while this thread has more apparent utility and narrative propulsion, by that same token, it loses some of the mystery present in Glazer’s film, where the consumption has a wonderfully abstract and eerie tenor. There is plenty of mystery elsewhere, though, such as that inherent in the fact that Elsa can’t see her brother or the aliens on the other side of the earpiece. This leads to some intriguing sequences that attempt to mediate this distance, with apparent encounters between Elsa and Franck concretized in a more classically sci-fi black-and-white animation, in which an Elsa with antennae navigates a spaceship’s futuristic architecture.
Clapin’s animation chops also come across in montage, where match cuts from one space to another often create the sensation of time compression and disorientation. His compositions have a striking, graphic quality, such as a shot that floats through the forest, watching three characters hike through the frame, their diagonal movement slicing through the vertical trees. Abduction scenes are staged in crafty, clever ways that have a matter-of-fact, gasping quality about them. In the pacing, there’s a point of contradiction — the overall mood feels wonderfully unhurried and patient, but the film, at the same time, moves through the plot a bit hastily, not lingering on most moments of interest for long enough to make too much of an impact, also meaning that many of Clapin’s gorgeous compositions are cut away from just as they are beheld. But there are still some quite impactful sequences, especially as the film winds down and Elsa is forced to weigh whether or not she can go through with sacrificing certain parties to the aliens’ project, and for the exchange of her brother. While it’s not without issues, the film does pull off some interesting riffs on the body-snatcher narrative, and more than anything, Meanwhile on Earth reminds us that it’s always fun seeing what an animator can do with a live-action toolkit.
DIRECTOR: Jérémy Clapin; CAST: Megan Northam, Sofia Lessafre, Catherine Salée, Roman Williams; DISTRIBUTOR: Metrograph Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 8; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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