REVIEW: ‘Foe’ Is Its Own Worst Enemy

In the near future, climate catastrophe has made Earth barely inhabitable. Junior (Paul Mescal) has been conscripted into a program that will force him to spend a year off-planet living on a space station orbiting the planet. Only he is allowed to leave the planet for this grand experiment. His wife Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) can’t join him. To prepare her for his leaving, Terrance (Aaron Pierre), an agent from the shadowy corporate-governmental entity running this program has to move in with the couple and record everything about their lives and personalities because when Junior is gone, he is gone, a replacement Junior will fill in for him. The replacement Junior ought to be exactly like the original so Hen can get on living without the real Junior. It’s a weighty concept rife with potential, but Foe, directed by Garth Davis and co-written with Iain Reid, who penned the original novel of the same name, struggles to bring all of its strong elements together.

Foe immediately starts off on the wrong foot. A title screen over-explains the condition the world finds itself in and the role human replacements play in it. Firstly, the human replacement elements of the movie don’t come into play for some time, so it was rather confusing at first. But much more challenging is getting into the world of yet another near-future world where climate change has ravaged everything. We’re living in a climate catastrophe right now. It’s hard to stomach the umpteenth dive into fruitless plains and hot, brown environments when that’s already quite evident right outside our windows.

Sure, the atmosphere and house set are gorgeous, as are everyone’s outfits. There are a few moments that play with light so beautifully, that you could almost be reminded of Days of Heaven. But the movie could have easily skipped the few lines of text and begun with the poignant scene of Ronan crying in the shower contemplating beginnings and the loneliness of not being seen by the only person who ever sees you.

It’s a shame to start off feeling negative because really Ronan, Mescal, and Pierre all put on excellent performances. Ronan is quietly suffering, Mescal is clearly losing his mind, and Pierre is enjoying every minute of it. Regardless of who is paired up in a scene or if all three or only one is on screen at a time, sparks are flying in every direction at all times. The extreme close-up camera shots do get tiresome pretty quickly, though. A substantial amount of the screen time is spent zoomed in on a single character’s face, filling the entire screen with just them for extended periods of time, over and over again. It does create a claustrophobia that benefits this small-scale movie. It takes place largely in a single, old house with immense amounts of tension boiling. But it also feels overdone and distracts from the interesting dynamics that could be playing out between characters instead.

Foe is a sci-fi movie, of course, but it’s more importantly a movie about a very specific and singular topic: the perils of getting married too young. It’s easy to chalk their awkwardness up to a bad script or weird acting choices, but it might be more prudent to recognize that Junior and Henrietta talk to each other like teenagers. They act like two people who not only barely know how to communicate but also don’t know how to be intimate with one another. It’s a specific pattern to their language and their interactions that portends a couple who, even after seven years together, are stuck in a singular understanding of how a couple is supposed to act. But when you immediately get married after school and live on an isolated farm with no friends or neighbors, you have no feedback on how weird you are together or influences to demonstrate how a healthy couple can look. It’s a textbook situation the two find themselves in, and each portrays their part excellently.

It’s what makes the three characters’ reactions to the increasing tension, jealousy, and anxiety so interesting. Junior is too self-absorbed to understand that anything is even wrong. Henrietta has never known anything else from which to derive the strength to do much about it. And Terrance is a worldly outside observer who is having a great time watching these two unravel. It’s just a shame that by the time Foe’s huge twist happens and the final act plays out, things are too complicated and confusing to feel totally satisfying.

If the movie dropped the hard sci-fi elements and was purely a romantic drama, these dynamics’ conclusions may have felt more satisfying. If the movie were just a pure sci-fi endeavor focused purely on the twist and removed the depth of Hen’s romantic struggle, the twist may have landed more concisely. But because the movie is trying to do so much at once, your head is too busy rattling with superfluous information to totally grasp the weight of the relationships and how interesting they really are. Beautiful as they both are, not even showing Mescal and Ronan naked again and again can give their relationship and its intricacies the attention it deserves.

There’s a lot of good in Foe. It’s full of incredibly interesting ideas and pulls great performances out of all three of its actors. But it’s trying to be too many things at once and in so doing prevents itself from totally fulfilling any of its promises.

Foe is streaming now on Prime Video.