Clara (2018) on Netflix
Suspended from his university, Dr. Isaac Bruno keeps scanning the sky for signs of life. His only applicant for an unpaid assistant's post is Clara, an artist with no science background.
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- Netflix2.9/5
- IMDb6.7/106,622 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes54%
Trailer
Plot summary
At Ontario University in Toronto, Dr. Isaac Bruno's search for signs of intelligent life has grown into an obsession that has made him antagonistic toward his students. He has used telescope time in Chile that belonged to a colleague's research, so the head of his department suspends him and cuts off his access to the university's facilities. The launch of the TESS telescope releases a flood of data anyone can analyze. Isaac posts flyers for an unpaid research assistant, offering room and board. Clara, an artist with no astrophysics training, answers, arriving with her dog Eeva. She says she is a hard worker who learns fast, and she carries rocks gathered on every continent except North America.
Cast
- Tal Zimermanas Lead Technician
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Clara (2018)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Troian Bellisario, who plays Clara, suggested a different ending for the film, a note director Akash Sherman accepted; he said he had a different ending in mind but it wasn't as good. She also raised quantum entanglement for one of the earlier drafts.
- Patrick J. Adams and Troian Bellisario, the film's married leads, had wed a little before shooting began and spent a large portion of their honeymoon working on Clara, which was shot in Toronto and its surroundings in March 2017.
- Director Akash Sherman, who started his career as a visual effects artist, made all the film's VFX shots himself instead of leaving them to his cinematographer, drawing on NASA material: planets transiting a sun from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and nebulae from the Hubble Space Telescope.
- The characters' use of public NASA TESS data led to a Clara-inspired academic paper by Welch and Moores, published in Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society under the title "Simulating Transits at the L1 Point", and it shares credit with Sherman.
- Composer Jonathan Kawchuk converted sounds from NASA's Voyager spacecraft into a synthesizer, sounds he baked into many of the tracks of his soft score, which sits alongside musical selections by Bob Dylan.
- For the film's NASA scenes the production used director Akash Sherman's alma mater Toronto Metropolitan University, then called Ryerson, and the Mississauga campus of the University of Toronto, because of their "spectacular buildings".
