J Paul Johnson
Body snatching makes for a great sci-fi concept. And has for decades. Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers made no literary waves but has been adapted to screen with great success in 1956 and 1978 (and a bit less in 1993 and 2007 as well as more loosely in 1998’s The Faculty and 2019’s Assimilate). The very notion of aliens covertly assuming the forms of our friends and family allows filmmakers to explore the very essence of humanity. The conceit works even in Zach Clark‘s darkly comic The Becomers, where parasitic aliens seeking human hosts are confounded by humanity’s paranoia and tribalism. The French film Meanwhile on Earth (Pendant ce temps sur terre) similarly employs this apparently-evergreen conceit, and with a neat twist: the human protagonist is forced to choose which humans should serve as hosts, and why.
Meanwhile on Earth aims high. It’s the type of genre film that gets called “elevated,” in part because of its arthouse leanings: an ambiguous narrative, an emphasis on ambience at the expense of action, a carefully created aesthetic, and the kind of lugubrious pacing that puts the slow in slow cinema. There’s nothing wrong with any of that, of course, and science fiction can aspire to great cinema as well as can any genre. Meanwhile on Earth offers up a couple of better-than-average set pieces that lean into its body-snatching influences but eventually forgoes physical action and sci-fi spectacle for a rather pedestrian approach to its central conflict.
The protagonist is a young aspiring graphic artist and writer named Elsa (Megan Northam in her debut feature starring role). Some time back, her astronaut brother Franck vanished on his first mission. He’s memorialized in a statue she sees every day on her way to work, and she grieves him constantly. She spends her days working, but practically in a stupor. The rest of the time she’s stargazing or drawing: the latter are inspirations for the film’s lovely black-and-white small-screen animated sequences retelling Franck’s story and portending a reunion.
A reunion comes, but not the one Elsa imagined. One night while stargazing, she is shocked to receive contact from Franck: his distant, crackling voice appears to her, and she finds a little wet globule she sticks in her ear canal, like a gooey AirPod, that serves as a transmitter. (I cannot imagine how desperately one must miss a family member to stick a mysterious foreign substance into an orifice, but Elsa does just that.) While the pod lets her talk with Franck, it also lets his captors talk to Elsa with their ransom demands. He’s been kidnapped and they demand a ransom of five humans in exchange.
Elsa’s desperate attempt to remove the pod makes for one excellent body-horror scene, and another involving a chainsaw, looming like Chekhov’s gun, another. Most of the rest of the action of the film consists of Elsa’s deliberations with the aliens and herself about which humans make acceptable ransom fodder and which do not. The concept is not at all uninteresting. But it puts an extraordinary demand on the actor playing Elsa, since the aliens are never seen: Northam has to communicate with them while being the only figure onscreen. She’s fine in the role, but the restrictions are simply too daunting for the film to overcome.
The conceit might work better if the lineup of humans Elsa considers for the ransom were fully developed characters. Unfortunately, none are. Most are casual acquaintances, some random strangers. And Elsa can’t really discuss her choice-making with them directly. It’s difficult to care, except in the abstract, whether any potential victim is selected or not. The plot becomes something of a philosophical exercise, a variant on the trolley dilemma in ethics: who should Elsa choose and why? Had the film had the foresight to develop some of these characters from the start, to imbue Elsa’s decision-making with some emotional stakes, Meanwhile on Earth might have made for a compelling addition to the roster of sci-fi body-snatching classics.
Instead, one might be excused for pining for each animation sequence. They offer a little respite from the tedium of the plot repetition (Elsa needs another victim), and they are memorably, handsomely executed. Director Jérémy Clapin’s first feature, the Oscar-nominated I Lost My Body (2019), took a macabre conceit—a severed hand roams across Paris in search of its owner—and made it a touching story of loss. Meanwhile on Earth doesn’t achieve the same lofty heights. It feels, despite its excellent visual design and interesting premise that reaches for the stars, simply earthbound.
