When Love Becomes an Alien Landscape: The Existential Madness of My Notes on Mars
Imagine this: You wake up one day, look at the person you’ve loved for a decade, and realize they’re… different. Not just emotionally distant or quietly resentful—their entire essence feels off, like a familiar song played in the wrong key. This isn’t just a metaphor for marital decay. It’s the premise of My Notes on Mars, Lili Horvat’s audaciously weird sci-fi head-scratcher, and honestly, it might be the most disturbingly relatable film of the year. Because here’s the thing: Love already feels like trying to decode an alien language. Horvat just literalizes the metaphor—and trust me, it’s glorious.
The Doppelgänger Trope Isn’t Just Sci-Fi Anymore
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: My Notes on Mars owes a debt to classics like Solaris and The Stepford Wives. But what makes Horvat’s take so unnerving is how she weaponizes our current collective paranoia about artificiality. We’re not just afraid of robots stealing our jobs anymore; we’re terrified that the people we love might already be algorithmically optimized versions of themselves. Margot’s sudden return—childlike yet mathematically brilliant, affectionate yet detached—mirrors our quiet panic that AI won’t announce itself with Terminators, but with subtle shifts in the people around us. A misplaced joke, a forgotten inside reference, a sudden obsession with… well, destroying your life’s work. Personally, I think this is why the doppelgänger trope is having a renaissance: It’s the only genre that can contain our existential dread about losing what’s “real” in a world where deepfakes and chatbots blur the lines daily.
Lili Horvat: The Master of Emotional Disorientation
Horvat’s genius isn’t in her storytelling mechanics—it’s in her refusal to comfort the audience. She’s like the cinematic version of a passive-aggressive therapist: You walk away feeling more confused than when you started, but weirdly enlightened. In her previous film, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, she dissected love as a neurological glitch. Here, she goes further, asking whether love is just a story we tell ourselves about someone’s pattern. Margot’s husband Sam clings to her because she still looks like the woman he married, even as she behaves like an alien tourist trying to mimic human affection. From my perspective, Horvat’s work is a masterclass in cinematic gaslighting. She makes you question whether the problem is the characters’ reality… or yours.
Mackenzie Davis: The Anti-Manic Pixie Dream Girl
Casting Mackenzie Davis as a possibly extraterrestrial mathematician isn’t just smart—it’s revolutionary. Davis has built a career playing women who seem emotionally armored but are secretly unraveling (see: Halt and Catch Fire’s Cameron Howe). Margot is the logical endpoint: a woman so consumed by intellectual obsession that her humanity feels optional. What’s fascinating is how Davis weaponizes her own beauty here. That ethereal glow we associate with her—think of her in Terminator: Dark Fate or The Favourite—now feels eerily uncanny. She’s not playing a robot; she’s playing someone who’s forgotten how to perform “wife.” And Rupert Friend, with his rumpled, earthy presence, is the perfect foil. Their chemistry isn’t romantic; it’s gravitational, like two planets stuck in a decaying orbit. One thing that immediately stands out is how their dynamic subverts the “mad genius” trope: Usually, it’s the man who’s emotionally absent, but here, Margot’s intellectual detachment is both the allure and the tragedy.
Why Mars? Or: The Danger of Loving an Idea
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room—the film’s title. Mars isn’t just a setting; it’s a metaphor for the human tendency to fall in love with concepts rather than people. Margot’s obsession with Mars (and her notebook filled with real-ish equations) mirrors Sam’s fixation on breeding horses in Hungary, a country neither of them truly belong to. In my opinion, Horvat is slyly critiquing the modern romantic ideal: We don’t love partners; we love the idea of partners. We fall for the version of someone we’ve constructed in our heads, and when reality diverges—even slightly—we panic. This raises a deeper question: Is love inherently narcissistic? Are we just trying to mold people into our perfect mental blueprints? When Margot tries to destroy her notebook, she’s not erasing her work—she’s rebelling against the tyranny of her own mind.
The Future of Sci-Fi Is Intimate (and Terrifying)
What My Notes on Mars gets right—what all great sci-fi should do—is use the genre to magnify human truths. We’re seeing this trend in everything from Ex Machina to Severance: The real horror isn’t aliens or machines; it’s the fragility of our own psyches. Horvat’s film suggests that the next frontier of sci-fi isn’t about spaceships or dystopias. It’s about the alienation we feel in our closest relationships. And honestly, that’s scarier than any Martian invasion. If you take a step back and think about it, isn’t that why we’re all here? Trying to decode the people we love, hoping they’ll stay the same… while secretly fearing they’ll become something unrecognizable. Just like Margot, we’re all stuck on our own personal Mars, scribbling notes in the dark, praying someone will understand the language we’re speaking.
Final Verdict: A Love Letter to the Unknowable
My Notes on Mars isn’t a film you “enjoy.” It’s one you survive. It’s a Rorschach test for anyone who’s ever questioned whether they truly know their partner—or themselves. By the end, Horvat leaves us with a chilling realization: Maybe the person we love isn’t a fixed entity. Maybe they’re a shifting equation, a mystery that can’t be solved. And maybe… that’s the point. What this really suggests is that love isn’t about compatibility or shared goals. It’s about choosing to orbit someone, even when their gravity could crush you. And honestly, isn’t that the most beautifully terrifying math of all?
