ANOTHER EARTH directed by Mike Cahill, written by Mike Cahill and Brit Marling, with Marling and William Mapother. A Fox Searchlight release. 91 minutes. Opens Friday (July 29). See listing Rating: NNNN
Remove the high concept of Another Earth and you’d have a conventional mumblecore drama about two lost souls seeking redemption. But the whole point of Mike Cahill’s evocative sci-fi feature is its existential gimmick: if there were an exact duplicate of our world, what would you give to go there?
Another Earth maps the interlocked destinies of a young woman (Brit Marling, who co-wrote the script with Cahill) and a husband and father (William Mapother) whose lives go horribly wrong on the night scientists discover the other Earth. Four years later, they meet again and embark on a complicated relationship.
The unhurried pacing grounds the characters in a convincingly mundane reality that anchors the story’s more fantastical elements. And Marling and Mapother create achingly real portraits of people enduring lives they never expected to live.
