“Meanwhile on Earth” (Pendant ce temps sur terre), is a French science fiction masterpiece that Jérémy Clapin directed and scripted. The film came out in 2024 and has been Clapin’s first fully live action work when he gained global recognition for his animated film ‘I Lost My Body.” Once again, as the film’s synopsis suggests, he elegantly delves into sadness and the emotional ‘edging’ in a human life, the film roams around grief and longing wrapped in a speculative fiction outline.
As the title suggests, the plot centers around Elsa, a young woman, who has been grappling with the tragic disappearance of her brother, Franck, an astronaut who went missing during a space mission for the last three years. As a result, Elsa is in a state of emotional paralysis, until she manages to find the source of her ache and starts to work through it.
Elsa gets what she believes is an alien communication one evening. The alien being on the other end claims that she knows what happened to Franck and can help bring him back. The catch is that Elsa has to find five human hosts for the alien to inhabit. This alien request initiates a disturbing moral voyage wherein Elsa, out of love, guilt, and desperation, willingly transforms into an agent of sacrifice.
This film is a blend of science fiction and psychological drama that is a gripping and slow-burning story. The film poses a critical and profound question: what extreme measures would a person take to bring back a loved one, and, more disturbingly, what would they do to others to achieve that goal?
Cast & Crew
- Director/Screenwriter: Jérémy Clapin
- Elsa: Megan Northam
- Annick (Elsa’s mother): Catherine Salée
- Daniel: Sam Louwyck
- Audrey: Sofia Lesaffre
- Vincent: Roman Williams
- Franck (voice): Sébastien Pouderoux
- Voice of The Alien Entity: Dimitri Doré
Also, the film’s editorial style by Jean-Christophe Bouzy provides hypnotically flowing, circular, and spiraling temporal rhythms that parallel Elsa’s complex psychological condition and inward disorientation. Coupled with the striking, atmospheric images of the film by the cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, The film Dan Levy’s synth-laden score adds a haunting and dreamlike, melancholic quality.
Visual & Tonal Style
Elsa’s emotional muteness, the numbness of grief, and the lifelessness of the world around her is captured by the film’s visuals. Her world is quiet, lonely, and longing yet cold and distant. The cinematography is clinical, almost sterile, with symmetrical compositions and muted color palettes that define stillness.
The use of minimalist animation in the film to show Elsa’s memories, dreams, and imagined interactions with Franck is surreal and hand-drawn. These segments add to the film’s poetic abstraction and helps blend the lines between memory, fantasy, and reality.
The film is a psychological drama mixed with quiet horror. Though there are no jump scares or space battles, a creeping dread builds with Elsa’s increasingly questionable actions. In this case, the horror is more emotional and mental rather than physical.
Core Themes and Emotion
Obsession and Grief
The film Meanwhile on Earth portrays the mystery of unresolved grief. Elsa’s loss of Franck leads her to a vicious cycle of self-isolation. Her obsession to bring him back pushes her to a psychological breaking point. Grief becomes an unwelcome entity that dramatically alters her existence.
Moral Ambiguity and Sacrificial Choices
The alien’s proposition—to let Elsa select five individuals to die so others can live—shifts from an ultimatum to a moral puzzle in the narrative’s broader context. Elsa takes steps to rationalize her choices and acts to remove those whom she rationalizes. As the story continues, her choices lead to cumulative consequences and the line distinguishing right from wrong begins to fade.
The Nature of Reality
Elsa’s disintegrating psyche raises the question of whether the aliens are real or hallucinations. Is Franck alive, or is his voice an echo of her trauma? This uncertainty pushes the boundaries of the narrative’s psychological scope, and keeps the audience pondering whether they are witnessing a sci-fi story or the tale of a woman in the process of falling apart.
Critical Reception
Meanwhile on Earth has won the hearts of many critics and film festival attendees. Its emotional storytelling complemented with stunning visuals and ambitious themes captivated many, and while some viewers appreciated the animation, others found the pacing a tad slow and the narrative overly dense.
Critics praised Megan Northam’s performance as Elsa, remarking how she captured emotional nuances and conflict far beneath the surface. Her stillness quiets the movie, her fall into moral compromise becoming tragic in hindsight.
Clapin’s direction also received acclaim for the precision of the book’s atmosphere, as well as for the visuals. While I Lost My Body used animation as a means to explore identity and fate, Meanwhile on Earth takes a more grounded—yet still surreal—approach.
Not all feedback, however, was entirely positive. Some reviewers considered the film to be emotionally cold and paced too slowly. Some critics claimed the vague rationalization for the alien’s presence was too ambiguous, and the morally gray ending was too unresolved. But for some, those same elements were the film’s highlights—staying with the viewer well beyond the credits.
Conclusion
Meanwhile on Earth is not a traditional sci-fi film. It has no reliance on display, advanced technology, or violent action sequences. Instead, the film centers on the human heart and the dark corners of grief: what occurs when grief becomes all-consuming and love morphs into obsession. Jérémy Clapin uses a sparse yet deeply moving storyline to masterfully provoke contemplation on loss and longing.
Meanwhile on Earth is a story absorbing in its emotional currents, evoking an experience not simply about outer space, but the inner cosmos burdened with grief. The film challenges the audience to sit with its ambiguity, an exercise in patience that is richly rewarding.
Divulging the depths of a character defined by her struggle to endow significance to her suffering, the film is, in its essence, the portrayal of a starkly intimate tragedy. Meanwhile on Earth captivatingly portrays her whirlwind of emotions with a striking performance. The breathtaking visuals of the Earth from space evoke the theme of profound grief within the the film seamlessly.
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