Neuchâtel 2024 Review: MEANWHILE ON EARTH Wanders Through Grief

Fantastic genres like science fiction, fantasy and horror lend themselves for hiding a message in your entertainment. Throw in monsters, aliens or revolting transformations and you can make the most difficult ethical dilemmas palatable for a larger audience. But some films do away with the 'hiding' part and go straight for the dilemma. One of those is French director Jérémy Clapin's new film Meanwhile on Earth (released in its home country as Pendant ce Temps sur Terre).

In it, we follow Elsa (Megan Northam, admirably carrying the entire film), a young nurse working in a hospital for elderly with dementia. Years earlier, her brother Franck was an astronaut who disappeared during a space mission, and the whole family is still coping, badly, with loss and grief. It doesn't help that the roundabout in town is adorned with a huge astronaut statue in Franck's remembrance.

Then, one night, a mysterious entity contacts Elsa, saying that her brother is alive and can be brought back to Earth, if she's fast enough. All Elsa needs to do is help the entity invade Earth, which, the entity assures, will be harmless. But when Elsa starts to follow the entity's instructions, it quickly turns out that there are many ethical dilemmas to overcome... even if you think the entity can be trusted. Which is a BIG if...

How far would you go for the chance to save a loved one? What price are you willing to pay? And what use is a life anyway if there is no purpose to it? Big questions, and Elsa gets confronted with them pretty hard, with little time to find a decent answer to them. Jérémy Clapin puts his protagonist through the wringer here, maybe a bit too much. Elsa doesn't just get saddled with an awful mission, her plans are thwarted by some extreme bad luck too, to the point where you start wondering what she did to deserve this.

The film looks good, Megan Northam is great, the few special effects are fine (and sufficiently gross) and Jérémy Clapin, an experienced animator, spices up the narrative with some animations. It's therefore hard to pinpoint why I don't like the film more. Maybe it's that the mix of drama and science fiction feels off, or the movie as a whole is just too dour and unrelenting. Its serious tone may seem fresh to some, and seeing it by itself may be to your advantage. But at the Neuchâtel International Film Festival, where I saw it, it was one in a string of very serious genre films. And I was left with a feeling like "Oh brother, ANOTHER one of those...".