This was never meant to be the film. It was supposed to be the backstory.

After Fox Searchlight acquired Another Earth, co-writer Mike Cahill sold them a bigger, future-set project called simply "I". It was about a world in which eye scans could identify people who had lived before.

Cahill couldn't crack the script. So he wrote its backstory instead, the origin of how that world came to be, and realized the backstory was the better movie.

In I ORIGINS (2014), a molecular biologist's newborn baby’s routine eye scan pings a match in a national database. Someone else, already dead, had the exact same irises. The scientist's rational worldview crumbles as evidence points to reincarnation.

It was a prequel to a film that did not exist. And still doesn't.