Elsa has been having visions. In several whimsical animated vignettes sprinkled throughout the dreamy French sci-fi film Meanwhile on Earth, Elsa (Megan Northam) is an astronaut with a chirpy disposition and a pair of antennae sticking out of her head, accompanying her brother Franck on his outer-space voyages. They fly past strange planets and stranger aliens, all while her brother, his face always hidden in shadow, is positively magnificent — the ideal noble astronaut.
But back on Earth, Elsa’s face seems permanently twisted into a grimace. There are no antennae to be seen on her disheveled head. Instead, she spends her days passively working at a nursing home, caring for people who are nearly as detached from reality as she is. She spends her nights alone by the statue of her brother, who has been missing for three years after a space mission gone wrong. The town erected the statue in his absence — their hometown hero — but an angry, despondent Elsa has graffitied over it, upset over having been abandoned by the person closest to her. So it might not have been unusual when, during one of her late-night jaunts by Franck’s statue, she suddenly hears his voice. This time, however, it’s not one of her daydreams, but an odd, panicked message from the real Franck, instructing her to put the strange seed pod she just found into her ear.
Thus begins the eerie, mesmerizing sci-fi indie from director Jérémy Clapin, who makes his live-action debut after helming the excellent Oscar-nominated animated feature I Lost My Body. With Meanwhile on Earth, Clapin puts an eerie, existential spin on the body-snatcher movie, a genre that has long lived in the shadow of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And while Meanwhile on Earth doesn’t necessarily revolutionize the genre, Clapin’s unnerving, lo-fi approach makes body-snatching aliens feel the most terrifying since Donald Sutherland first opened his mouth to let out a horrific inhuman scream.
When Elsa puts in her unearthly earbud, it implants itself in her brain, resulting in the first of the film’s brief dips into body horror, the shocks of blood and bodily fluids interrupting the slow-building dread that had characterized the beginning of the film. But after the physical horror fades, the existential horror starts to set in again. An alien voice orders Elsa to not remove the seed pod. It is a transmitter from the same telepathic aliens who have captured her brother, and they need Elsa to gather humans who can become their vessels.
In the grand tradition of post-Get Out “elevated” horror, Meanwhile on Earth is deeply steeped in metaphor. This is a movie less about an oncoming alien invasion than about the inescapable power of grief. Elsa, for the past three years, has been living in a kind of fugue state, trapped by her grief over her brother’s disappearance. She goes through the drudgery of life but has forgotten how to live. It’s with this mindset that Elsa sets off to find victims for the aliens — people who, like her, may not have anything worth living for.
Meanwhile on Earth is not overly elegant in its handling of its themes, but Clapin lends the film a surreal touch that elevates the somewhat standard body-snatching plot. The aforementioned vignettes — which lend a bittersweet whimsy to a somewhat grim film — are the inspired touches that feel like Clapin finding his groove as a director working between mediums. But even as Meanwhile on Earth’s slow, steady pace threatens to stretch into tedium, Clapin’s eerie approach is amplified by a terrific lead performance by Northam, who, in her first major acting role, bravely shoulders a tricky role. Elsa is a very stoic, internalized character, one whose apathy could easily get frustrating. But Northam plays the character with a sympathetic warmth and a steely resolve that makes the viewer understand — if not agree with — her increasingly ethically questionable actions.
Though it feels natural to compare Meanwhile on Earth to the gold standard of body-snatcher movies, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Clapin finds a much more contemporary personal dread in the concept than the Soviet-inspired paranoia of the 1956 and 1978 films. Meanwhile on Earth has more in common with Amy Seimetz’s unsettling 2020 film She Dies Tomorrow — they both tap into a nameless, fatalistic anxiety over our very existence. Because if the only thing waiting for us at the end of the blackness of space are ambivalent, body-snatching aliens, then what is there left to live for back on Earth?
