Yeah. It’s a rather puzzling and bleak experience.
Rhoda Williams (played by the awesomely haunting Brit Marling) is a brilliant and beautiful teen who’s been accepted to MIT. She’s got a bright future ahead of her, but in her exuberance and youthful carelessness, she gets behind the wheel after a boozy celebration and destroys a man’s family.
Okay, so it’s a drama? A sad, cautionary tale? Not so fast.
On that very night, it’s discovered that there’s another planet, visible from ours, that turns out to be a carbon copy, with a duplicate population. Like, a person-for-person, mirror-image duplicate. Sort of like a parallel universe, except it’s a nearby planet.
A-ha. Is this really a sci-fi movie? Hold that thought.
Rhoda emerges from prison a few years later, a shell of a human being. She sleepwalks through life, and takes a job as a janitor who scrubs toilets as though she’s trying to scrub her psyche clean. In her search for some sort of, I don’t know, absolution or something, she (a) enters an essay contest to become one of the first to visit “Earth 2” and (b) winds up becoming the cleaning lady for the man (William Mapother) whose family she killed.
Of course, he has no idea who she is, and as their relationship progresses, she seems to breathe some life into his miserable existence, with the ever-present ugly truth precariously hanging overhead. Is she nuts? Is he going to go nuts? Why does she keep going back? The tension this creates is more nerve wracking than watching people get stalked by a psycho killer in a horror movie.
Which is great, if it’s a psychological thriller. But, is it? Not sure.
It’s no secret that I’m not exactly an astrophysicist or anything, but throughout the movie, I remained distracted by the sudden appearance of this other planet, so close that it’s visible to the naked eye. How did it get here? If it suddenly rocketed into our orbit, wouldn’t it throw us off our axis or screw with our gravity or something? I realized that probably wasn’t the point. So I put aside my disbelief and waited. For the point, that is.
This is a recurrent theme… the filmmakers seem to continually ask the audience to just trust them and go along for the ride. As if all will be revealed if you just resist questioning their motives and choices. Um, okay.
In the final scene, the surprising conclusion to the movie seems to finally explain the purpose of the movie, which I think is just to provide cosmic, spiritual, and/or psychological food for thought. So, all our questions are answered with… a series of new questions?
This is either really brilliant or a total cop-out. I lean toward the latter, but you be the judge.
All confusion and criticism aside, this Brit Marling girl is so stinking intriguing. She's beautiful, of course, but there's something so compelling about her -- depth? Intelligence? Well, she writes, directs, produces, and she graduated from Georgetown with a degree in economics. Yep, smart cookie.
Keep an eye on this one. Maybe someday she'll actually give the Hollywood boys' club a run for their money.
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