Clara

After losing his wife, the astronomer Isaac Bruno has buried himself in work: searching for habitable planets around distant stars. Thrown out of the university, he continues at home and hires an assistant named Clara. She is not a scientist. She looks at things differently and sees what he cannot. Akash Sherman writes and directs. Patrick J. Adams plays Isaac and Troian Bellisario plays Clara. The two actors are married. It is a low budget Canadian production and builds its science fiction from ideas rather than effects. There is no space on screen: there is telescope data, a spreadsheet, code, and two people talking. The method of the search, transit photometry and the dips in light within the data, is genuinely explained. The subject is grief. Isaac is not looking for other life out of curiosity but because he cannot carry his own loss, and the film says so outright in its last section. At the end the narrative leaves realism and goes somewhere metaphysical. That turn divides people more than anything else in it: for some viewers it completes the meaning, for others it invalidates all the scientific effort. Who it is for: viewers who like small scale science fiction built on an idea, and stories about grief. Who it is not for: anyone wanting scientific consistency. The film abandons its own rules in the final half hour.