JP Nunez
What would you do if you had a chance to get a deceased loved one back? Would you compromise your moral principles? Would you have any qualms about inflicting untold pain and grief on others just so your suffering could finally end? I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, those questions never get old. No matter how many times I see them play out in film after film, they always intrigue the hell out of me, so when I first heard about Meanwhile on Earth, I knew I had to give this movie a watch. It promised to put a horror-adjacent sci-fi spin on this gripping ethical conundrum, and I couldn’t wait to see how it would all play out.
Meanwhile on Earth was written and directed by Jérémy Clapin, and it stars Megan Northam as Elsa, a woman struggling with grief. Her brother Franck was an astronaut, but he never returned from his last mission. He was simply lost in space, so unsurprisingly, everybody, including our main character, assumes he died.
However, that’s not actually the case. One day, seemingly out of the blue, Elsa receives a mysterious communication from her missing brother, and she begins to hope that she might see him again one day. But as usual, things aren’t quite so simple. Soon after talking to Franck, Elsa learns that her brother is being held hostage by extraterrestrial forces, and they’ll only bring him home if she helps bring them to Earth.
As you might be able to guess from that plot synopsis, Meanwhile on Earth stands or falls almost entirely on the strength of its lead character. Sure, Elsa isn’t the only person in this movie, but she’s the only one who gets enough screen time to make much of an impression. Everybody else comes and goes fairly quickly, so if Elsa doesn’t grab you, this film will be dead on arrival.
Thankfully though, that doesn’t happen. To be fair, Elsa doesn’t have any interesting quirks or charming eccentricities about her, so you might not love the character right from the get-go. But don’t worry, she grows on you very quickly. Actress Megan Northam is just eminently natural and believable in the role, so you’ll soon come to enjoy seeing this woman on screen no matter what she’s doing.
Then, when the siblings finally reconnect, Meanwhile on Earth gets even better. Their conversation kicks off a fascinating mystery that will make you sit up and pay closer attention as you wonder just what the hell is going on, and that puzzle only deepens as Elsa finds out what she has to do to bring Franck back home.
At first, the mysterious kidnappers’ instructions seem rather bizarre, so you might begin to suspect that this whole scenario is just in our lead character’s head. But don’t worry, these beings are very real, and as far as we can tell, their offer to return Franck to Earth is legit. Elsa simply has to comply with their demands, and while that might sound simple at first, it raises some thorny ethical questions and imbues the film with a number of intriguing themes.
I’ll let you watch Meanwhile on Earth to learn more about the specifics, but suffice it to say that at its core, this movie is all about life. It deals with the things that give our existence joy and meaning and the intrinsic value of every human being, and it executes these ideas in some clever ways you might not expect.
Most obviously, Elsa’s quagmire of grief and the moral compromises she has to make to bring her brother back are dripping with these themes, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a scene where Elsa asks Franck’s abductors why they want to come to Earth, and their answer plays into the film’s core concepts as well. In fact, their entire MO forces you to ask yourself how important real life is (as opposed to, say, a perpetual dream or a The Matrix-style VR stasis), so pretty much everywhere you turn, you can’t help but run into something that touches on these central ideas.
That thematic saturation makes Meanwhile on Earth a beautiful and complex exploration of human life, but in a somewhat paradoxical way, it’s also the movie’s biggest flaw. Because this story deals with so many different ideas in so many different ways, it ends up feeling a bit garbled and undercooked.
Most of the time, the film will just touch on a concept and then quickly move on to the next one, so no single theme gets the attention it deserves. Instead, the story is a bit of a thematic hodgepodge that doesn’t say quite as much as it should, and with great ideas like these, that shortcoming is a little frustrating.
But thankfully, it doesn’t ruin the movie. Sure, I wanted Meanwhile on Earth to say more, but what it does say is more than enough to earn a thumbs up from me. This is still a captivating meditation on what it means to be human, and it’s brought to life with one hell of a lead performance. That one-two punch of great themes and excellent execution is pretty tough to beat, so if you’re a fan of horror-adjacent sci-fi that will appeal to your intellect as well as your emotions, you should definitely give this film a watch.
Meanwhile on Earth is set to hit theaters on November 8.
