‘Meanwhile on Earth’ Review: Jeremy Clapin’s Latest Combines Shaky Sci-Fi Storytelling and Arresting Imagery

Making the jump from animation to live-action is no easy task, and only a chosen group of filmmakers — Tim Burton comes first to mind — have pulled it off successfully.  

The latest director to attempt that leap is Jérémy Clapin, whose 2019 animated debut, I Lost My Body, was an impressive mix of film noir, fantasy and coming-of-age angst that earned him two César awards in France, as well as an Academy Award nomination.

For his sophomore effort, Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur Terre), Clapin has scrapped his pencils and paper for a camera and a real cast. But although the medium is different, the narrative method is similar, combining genre tropes — in this case, science-fiction — with psychological drama in its tale of a young woman trying to get over the loss of her older brother, an astronaut who disappeared into outer space.

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Technically speaking, it’s a solidly made second feature, beautifully shot by Belgian DP Robrecht Heyvaert (Bad Boys for Life) and carried by a strong performance from newcomer Megan Northam (Greek Salad). But something works less well this time around: The genre elements aren’t always convincing and the emotional impact doesn’t resonate in the same way.

Perhaps it’s harder to get viewers to believe in the fantasy when it involves human actors and, where needed, some makeup and visual effects. There are, in fact, a handful of animated sequences as well, which Clapin renders in a retro 80s animé style, using black-and-white and a box-like TV format. Tellingly, those scenes add a level of intensity that the movie often lacks, carrying us away instead of grounding us on earth.

The plot centers around Elsa (Northam), an aspiring graphic novelist whose life was upended when her brother Franck got lost in space during an international mission. All that’s left of him is an honorary statue that sits outside of Elsa’s woodsy French town, where she works a day job in the same retirement home as her mother (Catherine Salée).

Elsa soon begins to hear voices emanating from beyond, including that of Franck. She’s still mourning his loss and imagines it’s all in her head. But then an invisible alien life form appears, providing her with what looks like an extraterrestrial earbud — a glowing viscous object that resembles a gob of magical spit — so that she can receive instructions that may help, perhaps, to bring her brother back from the cosmos.

Clapin keeps us guessing as to whether Elsa is making everything up because of her grief — this girl could really use a shrink — or actually experiencing a close encounter of the third kind. That ambiguity makes it hard to stick with her when she begins to lure people from town, including a pair of lumberjacks and several patients from the retirement home, into a nearby forest so that they can be body-snatched by alien forces. The plot feels too convoluted to be credible, and the film’s efforts to depict provincial French life never go beyond the perfunctory.

Meanwhile on Earth falls into a category known as “elevated genre,” where tropes from thrillers, sci-fi and horror flicks are inserted into more serious stories instead of the B-movies they’re typically used for. It’s a false label, because all good genre films are serious and have something to say — beginning with the very first Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956, which clearly inspired Clapin’s movie and which, when it originally came out, channeled the fear of Americans during McCarthyism and the Cold War.

The ambitions here are more intimate, focusing on Elsa’s inability to get past Franck’s disappearance, and using genre to convey that in a creepy, other-worldly kind of way. If the film teeters unsteadily between sci-fi and psychology, it nonetheless confirms Clapin’s visual talents, which are backed by a dreamy score from Dan Levy, who also scored I Lost My Body. In its best moments, Meanwhile on Earth takes us beyond our desolate everyday lives to a place we can indeed dream of — and also witness on screen.