Known for his animation work, the French filmmaker Jeremy Clapin He is fascinated by the parts of ourselves that life forces us to leave behind. More specifically, she is fascinated by his absence and what it means for someone to feel “whole” after a profound loss.

The miracle of 2019”I lost my body” told the story of a severed hand as it crawled through the suburbs of Paris in search of the man it once belonged to. With “Meanwhile on Earth,In his live-action debut, Clapin returns with an equally beguiling, if much less resonant, approach to body horror, about a grieving 23-year-old nurse who is told she can reconnect with her missing brother: a presumed astronaut. dead. after he disappears from a deep space mission.

Elsa (Megan Northam) is so desperate to hear Franck’s voice again that she would presumably do anything he told her, which turns out to be a boon to the symbiotic alien species her brother may have encountered in the cosmos. Whispers in the night tell him that he has the power to bring Franck back; All you have to do is place a translucent white seed in your left ear and follow the instructions it tells you.

Given the chance to repair the gaping hole at the center of her universe, Elsa doesn’t even hesitate to shove ET’s AirPod directly into his skull. His pain is so raw that he can only conceive of grief as a problem that must be solved (rather than seeing it as a solution in itself), and there isn’t a single thing on Earth or anywhere else that he wouldn’t try. to stop suffering. Unfortunately, nothing hurts a broken person more than the empty promise of being “made whole” again, and it doesn’t take long (really, just a few seconds of screen time) before Elsa begins to appreciate how difficult that can be. get these intrusive thoughts out of you. his head. In this case, that’s partly because an alien transmitter has attached itself to his soft tissue so tightly that he couldn’t remove it from his ear without losing half his brain along with it.

Like pain, Elsa and the symbiote are hostage to each other. The human is told that four other aliens need host bodies, and that it will be Elsa’s job to get them if she hopes to see her brother again and/or survive; It is not an invasion, it is simply “the end of one path” for the alien species and the beginning of another.

At first, Elsa has no problem finding potential targets: the man who sexually assaults her is an easy choice. But things get complicated from there, even though he works at a nursing home full of elderly people who might offer a convenient way to boost the numbers. As her bloody task nears completion, Elsa will have to take into account the fact that her reality has changed following Franck’s disappearance. You will have to accept that you have reached the end of one path before you can begin searching for another.

Clocking in at a brisk 87 minutes, it ranges from slasher-adjacent murder sequences to a series of tender 2D animated sequences in which Elsa takes her shared memories of Franck on a hazy space adventure.Meanwhile on Earth“it’s a movie that feels more compelled by its premise than its story, but Clapin is able to infuse it with the same ethereal anguish that gave life to “I Lost My Body.” Much of the credit belongs to composer Dan Levy (founding member of pop duo The Dø), whose shimmering soundscapes hold this jagged, shapeless film in a bittersweet embrace that allows it to take on so many different modes, just as pain allows it. to everyone. way of feeling.

Outright murder may be a step too far for Elsa, but it’s a testament to Northam’s nervousness in a performance we can’t know for sure until the end. Serene but spiraling from the moment we meet her (when she’s graffitiing the memorial statue her rural French town has made for her brother), Elsa isn’t exactly in denial, but she’s struggling to accept that the life that’s still available for her to live is not the same one he ran before Franck’s disappearance.

“Meanwhile on Earth” takes an opaque approach to its heroine’s psychology, and we barely get a temporal handle on how the rest of her family has been affected by her brother’s absence, but it’s clear that Elsa has been especially left out. paralyzed by her loss. She’s trapped in her place, with little to do beyond listening to signs from the universe; While it is unclear if she ever expected Franck to return, it is palpable without words that she feels like the keeper of his sacred memory and that she fears that finding a new future for herself would be like erasing the past she once shared with her brother.

It’s touching stuff even in the broadest strokes, and it probably would have been even more effective if Clapin had paused to detail Elsa’s relationship with Franck. But the writer-director prefers to traffic in ineffable feelings rather than details, and his latest film, like his last, is essentially a mood piece shot through with occasional moments of sharp clarity. Certain scenes manage to create their own impact (“We can be happy,” Elsa’s mother tells her, “but we have to choose to be”), but even for all its violence and veiled sci-fi menace, this is a Movie. soft and gorgeous that feels most in tune with its messages during the quiet rhythms when Elsa gazes at the stars in heartbreaking wonder or wanders through the forest, her steps careful not to break the glassiness of Levy’s score.

Once again, Clapin is more determined to crystallize the essence of loss than on the details of grief, and more focused on the need to become whole than on the work of achieving it, but “Meanwhile on Earth” is too shapeless to land with the same power as “I Lost My Body.” There, Clapin was able to draw a world of melancholic sadness from scratch, but here he struggles to extract a similar depth of feeling from a world that was not created to serve his purpose and that often seems to have a contrary agenda. yours. While Clapin eventually lands in an encounter that clearly highlights Elsa’s dilemma, that ending is almost too grounded for a film so vague that its flesh-and-blood protagonist begins to become as abstract as her missing brother; It’s hard to invest in the idea of ​​Elsa becoming whole again in a film that becomes more and more fragmented as it progresses.

Be that as it may, Clapin’s singular ability to sketch the impression of loss survives the shift to live action in a way that allows this film to feel indivisibly honest even as it falls apart. “Not everyone finds their way,” Elsa’s mother warns her at one point, and while I’m not entirely convinced where Elsa’s own search leaves her in the end, it’s rare to see the all-consuming nature of that search: the feeling of being separated from your own soul and the desperation of trying to get it back, interpreted with the cosmic uncertainty it demands.

Grade: B-

Metrograph Pictures will release “Meanwhile on Earth” in theaters on Friday, November 8.

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