Advancing on greatness by stealth, writer/director Jérémy Clapin’s Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre) isn’t all the way there, and he throws away a lot of goodwill towards the end, but the great stuff really is great, and his movie is bold and unusual too.
It also features a star with one of those strikingly watchable face. There’s a savage beauty to the features of Megan Northam, who plays a young woman whose astronaut brother went missing in space three years before, an event that has torn her psychologically to shreds.
Gone is the intention to forge a career in the arts, though Elsa still fervently sketches all the time. Instead she works for her mother in a care home, where she wipes down old folk who are not long for this world. She does it diligently, but without much enthusiasm.
Then one day she is contacted by a voice telling her that “we” can bring the brother back to earth, that he’s not dead, merely in a form of suspended animation somewhere in deep space. In return the entities contacting her want Elsa to find human bodies for them to inhabit on earth. Just five, they promise. No invasion, no mad multiplication of their numbers once they’re here. A fair enough swap – five nobodies for a very special somebody?
Invasion of the Body Snatchers? A bit, but Clapin’s approach is what marks this film out. It’s not really driven by plot or character but by mood, at least the best bits. With barely any budget at all, and nothing to speak of in the way of special effects, Clapin builds sci-fi from the everyday, an odd angle here, a fresh look at a familiar object there, sound design (by Manuel Drouglazet) that uses silence to great effect and a score by Dan Levy that switches from the plaintively ambient to the expressively choral and really helps as Clapin searches for the uncanny.
To an extent the mood is not unlike the French TV show from 2012, The Returned, with Clapin’s interest on emptiness, isolation and loss as apparent here as it was in his debut, I Lost My Body.
That film was entirely animated and Clapin drops in animated sequences here as well. They’re the most sci-fi bits of all, featuring humanoid beings with antennae and such like.
At a certain point Clapin rings the changes by switching from mood to event, and from sci-fi of sorts to something that’s much more emphatically a horror movie. There is a chainsaw and yes there is blood.
This is the least successful part of the movie, because Clapin is better at textures than action, but it marks a necessary transition for the story and for Elsa, who has to work out what to do with her trolley problem, the five people for the one person, and about living her life in the shadow of the past – self-actualisation lurks in the weeds of this movie, much as it did in I Lost My Body.
There isn’t much French sci-fi, or horror, but they tend to be good at it when they do have a go. Remember Claire Denis’s High Life, much underrated and a fabulous exercise in sustained tension in space. Or, in the horror field, Martyrs, or more recently Raw, both properly unsettling movies showing there’s more to the genre than pretty girls in tight T shirts being menaced by men with hooks (an ancient reference, but still valid).
Like both those movies this has style to burn and Clapin shows he has an eye for live action as well as animation. His casting choices are astute all the way down the line and Northam’s tightly constrained performance as the troubled Elsa manages to be both alienating and engaging, which is a tough nut to crack. What next, for her and her director?
Meanwhile on Earth – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
