The opening scene of Lili Horvát’s My Notes on Mars evokes that of Sandra Wollner’s The Trouble of Being Born: the contrast of a grey, granite pool against the bright green of surrounding nature, the water whooshing in the same lulling frequency as the wind. Both openings also instantly ingrain a slithering irksomeness to the film that will follow, the two characters on screen – a husband and wife in Horvát’s film, a father and daughter in Wollner’s – prancing around one another in constructed familiarity stilted by a sense of unease.
This carefully built sense of dread permeates the remainder of Horvát’s English-language debut, which stars Mackenzie Davis as gifted astrophysicist Margot. We meet her shortly after she’s settled in the Hungarian countryside outside Budapest, having left a prestigious job at MIT for a life reset in husband Sam’s (Rupert Friend) ancestral land. The circumstances around the big move are not fully laid out but clearly still raw, with Sam quick to tell their new acquaintances of his brilliant wife’s need for a little “rest”. Sam, meanwhile, buys a mare, claiming it’s a gift for Margot when in reality it serves his interest in horse breeding. He professes to love his wife, but what we see is the stark opposite: a man consumed by resentment and desperate for his wife to do as she’s told.
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When Margot disappears during a challenging hike that Sam bullied her into, he’s faced with the shock of grief and guilt, but this is quickly upended when she suddenly appears unharmed at her own service memorial. His already complicated feelings morph into something more sinister; his newly-returned wife is even more puzzling than the one who left, void of memories of Sam or their life together, filled instead with a mysterious need to destroy her precious research on Mars’ potential for human habitation and a yearning for a young astrophysics student she met only once at the local observatory.
Horvát’s tale of outer space is less Armageddon and more Under the Skin, the filmmaker’s muted Central European sensitivity bypassing flamboyant pyrotechnics to hone in on the parallels between our starved curiosity for the alien and our frustration at the mysteries of our own kind. Why are we so open to the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and yet so reluctant to understand each other? Margot is alien to Sam, an indecipherable creature, but she is also his Mars; a planet that once carried nothing but possibility that has since become utilitarian.
Davis plays the leading dual role with great assurance. Both versions of Margot carry within them a permanent inquisitiveness, one for the logic of numbers, the other for the volatility of the natural. The actress communicates this contrast through her gaze: while the Margot of before stares at what is right in front of her, slowly scribbling notes on the small palm of her hand, the Margot of after stares ahead, eagerly anticipating all that she cannot predict through calculations. Friend ends up an inspired counterpart, always one step behind and frustrated by his constant need to catch up.
Plagued by unshakeable frustration, Sam prods and prods at the strange creature in front of him only to be confronted with a mirror and a reflection that holds no mystery. It is there, in those barren fields, that Horvát decides to plant a seed, neatly tying up her sneakily moving allegory with great – and merited – earnestness.
