Another gloomy Sundance Film Festival award winner tricked out in sci-fi drag, Mike Cahill’s micro-budgeted flick juxtaposes a story of two people wallowing in guilt and grief against the discovery of a mirror-image planet (complete with a duplicate population) that suddenly appears above Earth.
Brit Marling — this year’s Sundance It girl — co-wrote the screenplay, and does well enough playing a 17-year-old aspiring astrophysicist. Her drunk driving results in the death of a pregnant woman and her young son — and puts the father, a professor who heads the music department at Yale University, into a coma.
Instead of going to MIT as planned, our heroine spends four years in the slammer. After a half-hearted suicide attempt upon her release, she decides to apologize to the father (William Mapother, aging far less well than his cousin Tom Cruise), who has emerged as a drunken, broken recluse. She chickens out, and because he doesn’t realize who she is, decides instead to improve his life in various ways, including sleeping with him.
After improbably winning an essay contest for a spot on the shuttle to Earth 2 — awarding a convicted felon would be great publicity, no? — she comes clean to her new boyfriend, who predictably doesn’t react well at all. Even with a clever final twist straight out of “The Twilight Zone,” this crummy-looking two-hander is a tough sit.