No genre has thrived more in 2024, and in so many different ways, than sci-fi. From the big-budget dystopia of A Quiet Place: Day One to the indie time-travel character study Omni Loop to the fall animated hit The Wild Robot, we’ve gotten pretty much every flavor of science fiction available so far, and there are still two months remaining in the year.
It makes sense the genre is the go-to place for all kinds of stories as our reality slowly resembles something you’d see in a sci-fi movie from years ago. Self-driving cars? Check. AI-assisted everything? Check. Alien invaders? Chec-…wait, that hasn’t happened … yet. But if it did happen, what would that look like? How would it occur? And what would you do to save yourself or your loved ones?
Those are just some of the many, many questions that drives Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth, a French-language sci-fi picture that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February and is just hitting the United States this month. Chances are, you haven’t heard of it. That’s OK, because I’m here to tell you that, in a year full of great science-fiction films, it stands tall among them, and is one of the best of the 21st century. Meanwhile on Earth is an all-timer, and a movie that will break your heart.
An earthbound alien story
The movie opens on an empty spaceship, and you hear only two voices, one male and one female, talking to each other via voiceover. They belong to Franck (Yoan Germain Le Mat) and Elsa (Megan Northam), a brother and sister separated by the former’s mysterious disappearance some years ago on a far away space mission. Elsa’s never quite gotten over it, and as she sleepwalks through her day job as a nurse to elderly patients and her empty nightlife filled with parties, she wonders what happened to her brother and wishes he were home.
One night, she gets her chance. On top of a deserted hill, she hears Franck’s voice transmitted through a radio antenna. His voice is distant and fuzzy, but in the few seconds she hears him, he instructs her to look for a seed in the ground and place it in her ear so they can talk more. (Think of it as an intergalactic earbud that’s wired to your brain.) She puts the seed in her ear, but instead of hearing Franck, she now hears a woman’s voice, who assures her Franck is safe … for the moment. If Elsa wants her brother back, she has to help Franck’s captors find their way to Earth.
“Is this an invasion?” she asks. Not exactly; only five of these beings will come to Earth, and all they want is to exist, not to invade or take over the world. They need Elsa’s help in finding a path in the woods to locate their rendezvous point and in selecting five people to be body swapped so these beings can have host bodies to inhabit. Elsa has only days to pull all of this off, or else Franck will be lost to her forever.
It’s more than just a highbrow Invasion of the Body Snatchers
On paper, this sounds like a typical Invasion of the Body Snatchers rip-off. Aliens slowly taking over the human race is an old, overused staple of the genre, and more bad movies have been made about it than good ones. The beauty of Meanwhile on Earth, however, is that it takes its high sci-fi concept seriously and isn’t bogged down with the details. Who are these beings exactly and why are there only five of them? Why is Earth so appealing to them? How does the physics of the body swap actually occur? And how is Franck alive after all these years missing in space?
Most of these questions aren’t answered, and it’s to the film’s credit that that doesn’t feel like a flaw at all. That’s because providing answers isn’t really the point of Meanwhile on Earth; it’s setting up Elsa’s lonely life, her desperate need for her brother and, by extension, some sort of connection to her life, and presenting her with an unbearable moral quandary: Is it worth saving a loved one’s life if you have take another’s? And what makes one life worth more than another?
Clapin doesn’t make this easier for his heroine by making the body-swap process seem almost painless. The humans being replaced don’t die, necessarily; instead, they are sent into a dream state, where they will live forever. Still, does that make it OK for Elsa to sacrifice strangers for her brother?
And some of the people she considers to select are ones that are marginalized or forgotten about by society: old people at the end of their lives, a homeless woman with no ties to anyone but her loyal dog, and a nasty tree-cutter who doesn’t hide his chauvinism. What makes them less than Franck, or even Elsa herself, who is drifting in her own dream-like state, lost in gazing at the stars or her comic book illustrations she creates throughout the movie? It’s this dilemma Elsa wrestles with throughout the movie, and made me question what I would do if such an extraordinary situation presented itself to me.
A dreamy yet grounded masterpiece
I’m making Meanwhile on Earth sound grave and, to quote Larry David, “a bit much,” and while it takes its subject and themes seriously, the movie is also astonishing beautiful, with touches of real human warmth rarely seen in the sci-fi genre. Clapin is careful to paint a brief but detailed portrait of Elsa’s life, which is filled with close relationships with her funky, pot-smoking father, her concerned mother who deals with Franck’s absence in her own quiet way, her best friend who is about to move away, and her playful pre-teen brother.
This portrait is aided by cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, who films Elsa’s small French town in a faint golden glow that’s from the setting sun, or the distant multi-colored lights from nearby buildings and street lamps, or, appropriately enough, the twinkling stars in the nighttime sky. The movie’s score by Dan Levy (no, not the Schitt’s Creek actor) is dissonant electronic music, which is standard for modern sci-fi films like this one, but it’s played in such a way that suggests the many mysteries the movie presents and leaves largely unsolved. All of these elements create a sci-fi movie that pulses with life and emotion; it takes a far-fetched premise and successfully grounds it in reality.
Clapin is still best known for his standout Oscar-nominated 2019 animated feature I Lost My Body, and he brings his animator’s eye to Meanwhile on Earth via three animated sequences at the beginning, middle, and end of the movie. This isn’t just an empty stylistic flex, though, but rather a further exploration of Elsa, her talents as an illustrator, and how she uses it to deal with her brother’s absence and satiate the need to reunite with him. These sequences show the dream state she would be in if she herself were body swapped, and makes a persuasive case that it’s not really all that bad to be replaced by an alien.
A path revealed, and a destination unknown
Meanwhile on Earth ends the way it should end, which is to say not all is revealed, and it’s up to you to decide what happens. Remember, this isn’t a big-budget sci-fi movie, so there’s no need to satisfy a mass audience who desperately need all questions answered and all mysteries revealed.
This film doesn’t do that, and it’s better for it. The ending is either happy or sad depending on how you interpret it. I’m leaning more to the former, although like everything else in the film, happiness comes at a cost, and you’re still left asking the film’s central question: Was everything Elsa did worth it?
Meanwhile on Earth is playing in movie theaters in select cities.
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