I have written about both Fall On Your Sword's soundtrack to "Another Earth" and the movie itself a number of times.
It was released to mixed review (62% favorable on Rotten Tomatoes).
Which is insane.
"Another Earth" is an indie, small budget movie. Co-writer and star Brit marling and co-writer and director Mike Cahill have conjured a sci-fi drama with a deeply satisfying ending.
Rhoda (Brit) is accepted at MIT, and after celebrating, she drives home, only to hear that a duplicate Earth has been discovered and if she looks out the window she can see it. So she does. And smacks straight into a car, killing a woman and her son and sending the man, a famous composer, into a coma.
Four years later, Rhoda is released from prison and, unable to communicate or deal with her past life, she takes a job as a janitor at her old school (in a very uncomfortable scene , she runs into an ex boyfriend). She decides to find the composer and apologize.
The soundtrack to this story is unreally beautiful, it finds the stress points in Cahill's beautiful and serene images. Britt is so withdrawn, her performance is a nuanced comatose walking dream. And, as the composer coming back to life, William Mapother gets the small moments, the small emotions that build to finding a way to deal with such grief.
The sci-fi aspect is always in the background, in strangely beautiful tableaux of exalted blue skies and cold raw mornings.
And the ending is superb. In one shot, everything is explained.
I loved it almost as much as I loved Atom Egoyan's "Exotica" another movie with a deeply satisfying ending. In the movies I admired most there is an inevitability about the conclusion. Same reason Vladimir Nabakov is my favorite writer. It is the synthesis and new synthesis at the heart of great art.
Movie: A
Music: A-