When Love Becomes an Alien Language: Why My Notes on Mars Is the Most Unsettling Romance of the Year
Sci-fi has always been obsessed with identity—who we are when stripped of memory, biology, or humanity itself. But Lili Horvat’s My Notes on Mars dares to ask a scarier question: What if the person you love most becomes a stranger not through betrayal, but through something fundamentally… unknowable? Starring Mackenzie Davis and Rupert Friend as a couple unraveling under cosmic absurdity, the film isn’t just a cerebral puzzle. It’s a mirror held up to modern relationships, reflecting how love often thrives on the edges of incomprehension.
The Illusion of Familiarity
Let’s get one thing straight: This isn’t a movie about Mars. Oh, the opening shots of the red planet might lure you into thinking it’s a space epic, but Horvat’s true frontier is the human mind—and the alien landscapes within a marriage. Davis’s Margot, a former planetary scientist turned reluctant equestrian wife, isn’t just struggling with amnesia after her mysterious disappearance. She’s a walking paradox: a woman whose mathematical genius remains intact while her emotional self regresses to something… new. Personally, I think this is where Horvat’s genius shines. By grounding the sci-fi elements in the mundane (Hungarian horse farms, marital snark), she makes the uncanny feel terrifyingly intimate.
Why does this work? Because grief and alienation are universal. When Friend’s Sam clings to Margot’s notebook—desperate to reconstruct the woman he loved—I couldn’t help but think: Isn’t that what we all do in relationships? We collect fragments of our partners—their quirks, routines, inside jokes—and build a narrative. But what if those fragments suddenly pointed to a different species of being? The film’s answer is chilling: Love becomes a haunting, not a home.
Substitution Tropes and the Ghost of A.I.
Now, I’ll admit it—when Margot’s doppelgänger vibes kicked in (Stepford Wives, anyone?), I rolled my eyes. Yet Horvat twists the trope into something fresh. This isn’t just about a “replaced spouse.” It’s about the terror of realizing you never truly knew someone. The film’s most provocative whisper? Maybe Margot was always this way—her obsession with Mars, her cold logic, her impulsive childlike streaks. Maybe Sam just never bothered to decode her.
And here’s where it gets personal for me: In an era of AI chatbots and curated social media personas, aren’t we all dating (or married to) facsimiles of people? We project our desires onto others, then gasp when they deviate from the script. Margot’s amnesia isn’t a sci-fi gimmick—it’s a metaphor for the moment you realize your partner’s soul isn’t a mirror, but a locked vault.
Why Davis and Friend Are the Perfect Accidents
Fun fact: Davis and Friend weren’t the original leads. Greta Lee and Andrew Scott were cast initially. But I’d argue their replacement is the film’s secret weapon. Davis has that rare ability to seem both ethereal and grounded—a Martian observer trapped in a human body. Friend, meanwhile, radiates the kind of rumpled, earthy desperation that makes Sam’s denial believable. Their chemistry isn’t sizzling; it’s crumbling, like a sandcastle in a windstorm. And that’s exactly right. If they’d been conventionally magnetic, the story’s central mystery would collapse. Instead, you’re left wondering: Did they ever truly connect, or were they just orbiting each other all along?
The Real Mars: A Planet Called Loneliness
Let’s talk about the math. Real MIT scientist Gaia Stucky de Quay consulted on Margot’s notebooks, littering the screen with equations that 50 people on Earth could decode. But here’s the kicker: None of it matters. The numbers aren’t the point. They’re a Rorschach test for the audience—and for Sam. We’re all scrambling to “solve” Margot, just as she once tried to solve Mars. What makes this fascinating is how Horvat weaponizes our need for logic. In a world where STEM is often seen as the ultimate truth, the film slyly suggests that equations can’t explain the singularity of human (or post-human) experience. The real red planet isn’t in space—it’s the void between two people who speak different emotional languages.
Final Thoughts: The Future of Sci-Fi Is a Broken Mirror
My Notes on Mars will frustrate viewers craving closure. Does Margot have a secret? Is she an alien, an A.I., or just a woman reborn through trauma? Horvat refuses to answer—and that’s the point. The future of sci-fi, as this film imagines it, isn’t about explaining the unknown. It’s about confronting how little we understand the people sleeping beside us. As I walked away, I kept circling back to one idea: Maybe the scariest thing in the universe isn’t death or doppelgängers. It’s the realization that love is just a shared hallucination, and the moment it ends, we’re all stranded on our own private Mars.
