It is easy to imagine why Another Earth took this year's Sundance Festival by storm. It was written by its attractive blonde star and its storyline includes several things Sundance audiences like: an alienated protagonist, a family-shattering car crash and an atmosphere of gloom.
If that were not enough, it combines its standard-issue plot with an artificial science-fiction conceit about a parallel earth suddenly appearing in the sky, and providing a giant metaphor for second chances.
Writer Brit Marling plays Rhoda, a high-school student who has just won a place to study astrophysics at MIT on the evening that the planet appears. Driving drunk after a party, she smashes into another car, killing a child, his pregnant mother and putting the driver, a music professor, into a coma.
Four years later, Rhoda is out of prison and racked by guilt. She decides to make a confession to the composer (William Mapother) who is now a hermit-like wreck living in a filthy house surrounded by bottles of booze. But, once there, she loses her nerve and claims to be part of a cleaning service.
