Fans of Jérémy Clapin’s strange, haunting animated movie I Lost My Body (which is streaming on Netflix) may be surprised at the pivot he took with his second feature film, Meanwhile On Earth. This time, he’s working in live action, with a science fiction premise involving a secretive alien invasion. The first trailer for Meanwhile On Earth has arrived, and for fans of low-budget, character-driven sci-fi, it may look familiar: It feels like a blend of Jonathan Glazer’s striking 2013 Scarlett Johansson thriller Under the Skin and Mike Cahill’s dreamy, shocking 2011 drama Another Earth.
Just as in both those movies, Meanwhile On Earth centers on a woman who feels isolated and lonely, caught outside a normal human experience and drifting through bleak landscapes that reflect her alienation. As in both those movies, “alienation” is literal: The protagonist, Elsa, is waiting for her astronaut brother to return from a mission when she gets word from an apparent alien invasion force that wants her to assist them with possessing human bodies. They claim they have her brother and say they won’t return him unless she enables their quiet arrival on Earth. It isn’t clear what they want with the planet, but their means of acquiring it doesn’t speak well for their ethics or intentions.
The trailer and the premise seem a long way off from I Lost My Body, an eerie fable about a young man’s severed hand slowly making its way back to him across a grimly fantastical version of Paris. But the trailer for Clapin’s new movie strongly suggests it’s going to be another story about someone fighting to make meaningful connections in the middle of a crisis, and trying to come to terms with how little they can rely on others. In that, it also resembles another recent movie about a woman facing an alien invasion: Brian Duffield’s No One Will Save You.
Among all these similarities, the Under the Skin comparison seems strongest, at least in this initial look at the film: The framing of the cinematography, the sere landscapes, the bleak coloration, the focus on Elsa’s face, even the bloody crisis in an isolated woodland setting — they all feel like echoes of Under the Skin, but this time seen from the human point of view instead of the alien one.
Here’s Metrograph’s official synopsis of the movie:
Elsa (Megan Northam, in her debut feature starring role), along with her family, is struggling following the disappearance of her brother Franck, an astronaut who vanished during his first mission. While stargazing one night, Elsa is shocked to receive contact from Franck, but her joy is short-lived when she learns of the dark and troubling forces behind Franck’s reappearance, forcing her to confront the lengths she will go for the brother she once feared was gone forever.
Meanwhile On Earth will release in American theaters on Sept. 13.
