Elsa mourns her brother Franck, missing and presumed dead in space. She works at a care facility and lives with her mother and younger brother, all trapped in unresolved limbo. Franck reappears as a disembodied voice and an alien presence offers to return him if Elsa procures four people as hosts. Those hosts will not be killed but will have their personalities erased or dampened. The narrative treats the choice as a moral thought experiment, examining whether different lives carry different value and prioritizing human emotion and subtlety over spectacle. Digital release begins 25 August.
Elsa works at a care facility for elderly people and lives with her mother and younger brother; they are all stuck in the kind of limbo that comes with unresolved family mysteries. One day, Elsa encounters Franck once more as a voice. It seems that an alien presence may be able to return him to his home planet, if Elsa is prepared to help them out with a little favour:
The people won't be killed, but their personalities will essentially be erased or dampened to become hosts for the extraterrestrials. A Hollywood blockbuster would perhaps resolve this dilemma quickly, as a subplot in a larger invasion plot, but here the dilemma is the meat of the film, a kind of thought experiment, and the challenge of having Elsa plausibly wrangle with her decision is what enables a fine performance from Northam.
The film is interested in whether different lives have different value, which is a thorny question. You might think it is obvious that they are all equal, until you realise that perhaps you may feel differently about saving your spouse or baby over a serial killer, say. What that elevates animator Jeremy Clapin's live-action debut is that it gives these pub chat hypotheticals a human face and emotional subtlety; this isn't something like Saw, a film that plays gory games with deadly consequences.
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