Another Earth: The Duplicate Planet and Grief

A second Earth appears in the sky. It hangs there, blue and cloud-marbled and impossibly close, visible in daylight over car parks and cul-de-sacs and the flat roofs of American high schools. Astronomers confirm it is a mirror: same continents, same cities, same seven billion people, an exact duplicate running alongside our own.

Mike Cahill’s film spends almost none of its running time on this. It spends its running time watching a young woman named Rhoda Williams push a mop across a school corridor.

That inversion is the whole design, and it is why Another Earth remains the best argument available for the proposition that science fiction is a lens rather than a subject. The film reportedly cost somewhere around a hundred thousand dollars. Its one effect is a planet composited into the sky, and it deploys it perhaps a dozen times. Everything else is a handheld camera in Connecticut interiors, following a person who has done something she cannot undo.

What happens

Rhoda (Brit Marling, who co-wrote the film with Cahill) is seventeen, brilliant, and has just been accepted to MIT to study astrophysics. She goes to a party. She drinks. Driving home, she hears on the radio that a second planet has been sighted, and she leans across the wheel to look up at it through the windscreen — a moment of exactly the wonder the film will spend the rest of its length denying her — and she does not see the car stopped at the intersection.

John Burroughs (William Mapother) was in that car with his pregnant wife and his young son. He survives. They do not.

Rhoda serves four years. She comes out at twenty-one with no MIT, no future she can bear to touch, and a mother’s house to live in. She takes a job as a janitor at the high school she attended, because it requires nothing of her and puts her among nobody. And then she drives to John’s house, intending to apologise, and cannot do it — and when he answers the door she panics and tells him she is from a cleaning company, offering a free trial.

He lets her in. She cleans his house. She comes back the next week.

The mechanism

The premise is grotesque and the film knows it. Rhoda is hiding inside a lie in order to be near the man whose family she killed, performing service as penance he has not agreed to receive, and the film’s engine is the certainty that this cannot hold. Every scene between them carries a fuse. Mapother — a genuinely underrated actor who plays John as a man rotted hollow by grief and only intermittently interested in behaving well — gives her nothing to be comfortable with.

And overhead, all the time, the other planet. Cahill’s discipline with it is the film’s real craft achievement. He never cuts away to mission control, to a press conference, to a crowd scene of global reaction, to any of the machinery a normal film would build. The planet exists in this film exactly the way an enormous public event exists in a private life: it is on the radio in the background, it is in the sky when you happen to look up, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that you have to get through Tuesday.

Why the handheld works

Here is the technical argument, and it is more interesting than “they had no money”.

Cahill shot this himself, largely on small digital cameras, handheld, in available light, in real houses and real corridors. The image is grainy, often underexposed, sometimes soft. Faces are shot very close and slightly off-centre, frequently in profile or from behind, with focus that drifts.

That texture does something a clean image could not. The planet composite is the only thing in the film that is unambiguously made — smooth, rendered, photographically perfect against a grainy handheld sky. In a slick film, the effect would be one polished element among many and would read as ordinary. Here it is the single artificial object in a documentary, and it produces genuine unease every time it appears. The cheapness of the photography is what sells the expensive shot.

The same logic runs through the sound. Cahill uses the score, by Fall On Your Sword, in a narrow band of drone and pulse, and drops it entirely for long stretches so the film is carried on room tone — a vacuum cleaner, a radio, a kettle. When the music arrives on an image of the planet it feels like the universe intruding on a domestic recording, because that is literally what it is.

And the film has one formal idea it executes beautifully: the broken-mirror hypothesis, delivered in a radio segment, which proposes that the two Earths were identical only until the moment each became aware of the other, after which they began to diverge. It is offered as astronomy. It functions as the film’s entire thesis about Rhoda, delivered without a single character having to say so.

The ancestor

The reflex comparison is Melancholia, which arrived the same year and also put a planet over a lawn. The comparison is nearly useless — von Trier’s planet is coming to kill everyone, and his film is about depression’s certainty that it should.

The real ancestor is Solaris, in both Tarkovsky’s and Soderbergh’s versions and in Lem’s novel underneath: the science-fiction object that exists in order to hand a grieving person a second chance they are not equipped to hold. Solaris manufactures the dead wife. Cahill manufactures a second self. Both films understand that the fantasy is a trap — that the wish “let me have the version of my life where I did not do that” is not a wish for a planet, and that granting it changes nothing about the person doing the wishing.

Its closest living relative is its own festival programme. Marling co-wrote and starred in Sound of My Voice, which premiered at the same Sundance in the same January of 2011, and the two films together make a single argument: give one impossible premise to a domestic drama, shoot it for the price of a used car, and refuse to explain the premise. Between them they built a template that the next decade of small science fiction lived on. You can see the same instinct in the pared-back futures of Advantageous and in the worn, hand-built spaces of Prospect — sci-fi that spends its money on one idea and its attention on a face.

The case against

The film is emotionally manipulative in ways it does not always earn. The Purdeep subplot — an older janitor who does something terrible to himself — is a hard, striking piece of business that never quite integrates and reads as a symbol wheeled in. Marling’s screenplay gives Rhoda a saw-playing musical talent that arrives from nowhere to service a scene. And the middle act leans on a coincidence structure that only holds because the film keeps its camera close enough to your eye that you cannot see the wider room.

There is also a fair criticism that the film is more interested in Rhoda’s redemption than in John’s loss, and that its treatment of a man whose family was killed occasionally shades toward using him. Mapother’s performance is doing a lot of quiet work to keep that from tipping.

The verdict, spoiler-free

Another Earth is a first feature made for nothing that understood something most expensive science fiction never grasps: the point of putting an impossible object in the sky is to see what it lights up on the ground. It launched Brit Marling, announced Mike Cahill, and gave the 2010s a working model for how to make sci-fi with no resources and no apologies. It won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance and got picked up on the strength of a planet and a face.

It streams widely and it runs ninety minutes. Watch it with Sound of My Voice as a double bill and you have the best evening 2011 has to offer.

Spoilers below

The essay contest is the plot’s spine. A private venture opens a public competition for a seat on the first civilian flight to Earth 2, and Rhoda enters — the astrophysics prodigy who threw her life away writing about why she deserves to leave the planet she ruined. The film treats this with total seriousness and no irony, which is what saves it.

The relationship with John develops into exactly what you fear it will, and Cahill does not flinch from the ugliness of it. She cleans his house; he begins to want her there; they sleep together. Every moment of tenderness is built on a lie so large that the audience spends it wincing, and the film’s nerve is in letting them have something real inside something unforgivable.

The confession scene is the film’s peak, and Marling and Mapother play it superbly. She tells him who she is. What Cahill understands is that the revelation offers John no relief whatsoever — the woman who destroyed his family is also the only person who has made his life bearable in four years, and now he must lose both at once. His reaction is violent, and it is correct, and it resolves nothing.

Rhoda wins the seat. And then she gives it to him. That is the film’s real ending and its most quietly devastating idea: the second chance she has spent four years dreaming about is handed to the man she owes, because the version of himself waiting up there is a man whose wife and son are alive — the duplicate John who was never hit, who never got the phone call, and whose life continued in the direction this one lost. She cannot give him his family back. She can give him the only ticket to a place where he still has one.

Then the last shot, which is one of the great cheap endings in modern sci-fi. Rhoda stands outside her house, and a woman walks up the path toward her. It is Rhoda. The other Rhoda — the one whose Earth diverged at the moment of mutual awareness, the one who therefore may have looked up at a different second and never crashed at all, the one who went to MIT. The two women stand facing each other. Cahill cuts.

He never shows you her face’s reaction, never gives you a word of dialogue, never resolves which life the visitor has had. The broken-mirror hypothesis said the two worlds separated the instant each learned of the other. If that is true, then the woman on the path has spent four years being everything Rhoda might have been, and has crossed the sky to look at the one who wasn’t. The film ends on the only reunion that matters and refuses to let you hear a syllable of it.