Rhonda (Brit Marling), a bright and ambitious seventeen year
old who has recently been accepted into MIT is driving home one night from a
party when she hears an announcement on the radio stating that a planet has
been discovered close to our own. The DJ tells his listeners to look up into
the sky in search of the pale blue dot. Rhonda is mesmerized by the sight and
takes her eyes off the road causing a collision which kills a woman and her son
and leaves the father, John (William Mapother) in a coma. Four years later
Rhonda is released from prison and gets a cleaning job at a high school. She
wants to contact the man whose family she killed and apologise but loses her
nerve and instead says she can clean his house. The film charts their
relationship as Another Earth draws slowly closer to their own.
The film cost just $200,000 and while being remarkably well
made and cast for that amount does look a little rough and cheap. This is not
to the film’s detriment though as I don’t think that a shiny or glossy looking
film would have worked quite so well. The science behind the story is fairly credible
and as someone who is fascinated by astronomy, it had me going along with it.
Although problems such as tides and light were ignored by the film makers, I didn’t
let them distract me. There will be obvious comparisons to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia but they are mostly
misplaced. The film lacks the sense of impending doom and instead views the
second Earth as a chance for redemption and opportunity.
