Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011)

The sci-fi label bestowed by this low-budget drama featuring the discovery of a duplicate Earth is wholly misleading: Another Earth is essentially a meditation on loss in the vein of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with the background presence of the twin planet symbolising the existence of alternative paths our lives could have taken.
Co-writer Brit Marling plays a teenage girl who kills a composer's wife and son in a drunk-driving incident and drops out of the college future in remorse after coming out of prison to become a cleaner. Her self-flagellation then leads her to find the man whose life she destroyed, and attempt to help him out of his mire without letting on her real identity or motive.
Very similarly to Eternal Sunshine, it's an uncertain blend: it swings from real poignancy to a misguided sense of its own perspicacity from scene to scene as Marling's performance fluctuates from appealing freshness to gratingly drawn out moping. It ends up in deficit overall largely because it places far too much stock in the power of its conceit, which is just too heavy-handed.

5/10