Another Earth

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Year:	2011
Country of origin:	USA
Director:	Mike Cahill
Genre:	Tripped out sci-fi drama
Starring:	William Mapother, Brit Marling
Rating:	5/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1549572/
Tagline:	No tagline
Favourite line:	"What would we really like to see if we could stand outside ourselves and look at us?"

Don't you just love this two month hiatus from the blockbuster shite that Hollywood generally hurls at the screen?
Don't you?
Eh?
Well we do down here at Smell the Cult HQ and, though it may be drawing to a close for the time being, there was still time for one last hurrah.

The plot:
A young woman, celebrating gaining a place at the prestigious MIT, heads home after a party a little worse for wear. When a radio broadcast announces that a new planet is visible in the night sky, her astronomer's brain kicks in and, briefly, her attention turns heavenward, away from the road. Drink-addled, she loses control, and ploughs into a stationary vehicle, killing wife and child within, leaving the widower in a coma.
Imprisoned, she is released some four years later, the world now come to terms with the new planet in the sky, though still intrigued, as it appears to be an exact replica of Earth. Desperate to gain some form of redemption, through a MacGuffin of reasonably huge proportions, the young woman gains the trust and friendship of the man whom she made a widower and, slowly, tenderly, over time, she begins to make amends.

Sounds like a right load of old wiffle, I'll grant you, but this is handled with such a gentleness of touch it's hard not to be enthralled. Mixing indie stylings with the sense of the epic majesty of our cosmos, this manages to at once warm the cockles and inspire awe at our insignificance.
With a genuinely beautiful relationship as the core of the story, in many ways this is reminiscent of last years excellent, excellent Monsters: the central, fantastical premise simply serving as a backdrop over which can be draped the actual decoration of the real storyline.
Heartwarming in a way that so little cinema manages to be, the soulless purveyors of rom-coms could do well to take a look at both the performances and the construct of the emotional narrative, here, and learn a thing or two about genuine human interaction.
There really aren't enough superlatives to describe this so I'll stop.
Now.