Canadian Mackenzie Davis (Speak No Evil) and Brit Rupert Friend (The Phoenician Scheme) star as a North American couple living in Hungary whose frayed relationship faces an unthinkable crisis in writer-director Lili Horvat’s audacious, evocative third feature, My Notes on Mars.

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Representing Horvat’s first film largely in English, it finds the Magyar talent delving into a cerebral strain of science fiction with deep literary roots. It’s terrain her last work, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, drove nearby with its own unsettling intersection of neurology, the uncanny and psychological dysfunction. This time round, Horvat is on to something even more deliciously odd with a study that mashes together grief, matrimonial disharmony, the alien nature of mathematical minds, and desire’s wild pursuit of obscure objects. My Notes on Mars opens the Venice Days strand on the Lido.

Anyone writing about this will have to be careful about spoilers, so readers here should be forewarned this review will give away one of the main early plot reveals. There is really no way to talk about the film unless one falls back on wispy vagaries and pointed allusions to cinematic precedents, or just explaining the act one set-up and then stopping with the warning that things get really weird thereafter. But Horvat’s script, with its interesting evasions, lacunae, and crabwise approach to metaphor, deserves at least a little serious dissection, so let’s get stuck in.

At first, everything seems as tranquil as the surface of Mars, seen in the opening moments from space and then slowly zoomed in on as the camera seems to enter a black wormhole in the red soil. Atonal sound with high-pitched droning noises suggest something is off as the action cuts to Margot Fogal (Davis), aboard a ferry somewhere in the Hungarian countryside, calling husband Sam (Friend) to say she’s off to Budapest for the day and will meet him later.

Look very closely at their facial expressions and notice their slightly peeved tones of voice; it’s obvious not all is right between them. By degrees, we learn that Margot was a rising academic star studying planetary science and that she’s been musing on the viability of life on Mars recently in her notebook, which to the uninformed viewer will just look like a bunch of baffling equations and mathematical symbols. (Real M.I.T. scholar Gaia Stucky de Quay consulted for the film, so the 50 people in the world who might understand the science should be pleased that the prop looks pretty plausible.)

It seems at some point, Margot gave up her career to come to live in Hungary with Sam, whose parents are Hungarian, so that he could pursue his passion for breeding horses. Theoretically, their pairing could work if there’s a sufficient overlap in interests but as Margot says later on, she’s much more of an indoor creature than Sam, who loves nothing more than his work, his animals and tramping around mountains.

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It’s on just such an Alpine adventure (shot in Austria) that things go very wrong. Margot has been absorbed with a new idea she’s discovered in her work and has even reached out to a scholar at NASA to discuss it. Grouchy from lack of sleep, she makes it obvious that she’s not into going on the hike with visiting multinational acquaintances Sam has planned for them that day. On the hike, she lags behind, and when Sam reaches a summit he suddenly realizes she is missing.

Police are informed, searches are launched, but after an unspecified amount of time it is decided that she must have fallen off a cliff and is very probably dead. A stricken Sam gathers friends and family from all over the world for a memorial service, but who should show up but Margot herself. Except, even accounting for the fact that she has amnesia and mistakes Alex, a young astronomer she met once in Budapest (Atanaz Babinchak), for the object of her affection, she doesn’t seem like the same woman who went missing on the mountain. At times her affect is childlike, particularly in terms of impulsivity, but she remembers enough math to be able to solve sums quickly. That said, she becomes obsessed with destroying her notebook so Sam, hoping that she’ll go back to the way she was eventually, tries to hide it from her.

After a while, Sam, Margot and the viewer will be thinking this is not just a case of lost memory but more like the situation in [spoiler warning ahead] The Stepford Wives, Solaris or, more recently, the segment in Kinds of Kindness where Emma Stone plays a woman who may or may not be a doppelganger. Genre theorists might note that this substitution meme is all over sci-fi and horror these days, manifesting in its way in the recent Backrooms, possibly standing in as a trope for A.I. chatbots. Horvat’s take on it here becomes a meditation on, among other things, the essence that one loves in someone. Is it the mind, the body, or our own idea of who they are?

Somehow, this all dovetails with the fact that Davis and Friend were themselves substitutes for Greta Lee and Andrew Scott, who were cast as the leads when the film was announced in 2024. No disrespect to the latter actors, but having seen the final product it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Davis, with her own otherworldly beauty and naïve quality, in the lead role while Friend brings a bumptious solidity that suits Sam as written. In terms of chemistry, they’re convincing as two people who don’t quite fit together and yet seem to crave one another all the same. That awkwardness befits a story that, like Horvat’s earlier work, offers a screwy, off-centered view of modern love.

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