Foe takes place in 2065. As is almost always the case these days, the future looks even worse than the present, so much so that corporations want to establish colonies in space.
Steeped in Gothic austerity, Foe — based on a novel by Lain Reid, who co-wrote the screenplay with director Garth Davis — displays palpable ambition as it deals with marriage, artificial intelligence, gender roles, and crushed dreams.
Working with two fine actors (Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal), Davis mixes elements from various periods, using anachronistic music and introducing futuristic sci-fi concepts that unfold when a stranger (Aaron Pierre) visits the farm where Hen (Ronan) and Junior (Mescal) live in isolation.
Smooth-talking and assured, Pierre's Terrance represents vaguely defined corporate and governmental interests. He informs the couple that they’ve been short-listed for an important experiment. If they pass vigorous tests, they’ll qualify to spend a couple of years on a space station called The Installation, part of a strategy to ensure human survival once the world starts running on empty.
As the story evolves, we learn that only Junior has been selected. Hen (short for Henrietta) will remain behind. Junior has no choice in the matter; he’s been conscripted, a human guinea pig.
Lest she be lonely, Hen will be supplied with a substitute human, a replicant that precisely mirrors everything about Junior: his appearance, his memories, and his ability to simulate the ardor that once pervaded their now-flagging relationship.
Hen and Junior aren't exactly overachievers. Junior works at an industrial chicken farm and Hen earns a bit of money as a waitress, but there’s little reference to the world beyond the couple’s 200-year-old Midwestern farmhouse. They’re like prisoners sharing the same cell.
Tension mounts when Terrance moves in with the couple as part of Junior's prep and to help develop Junior’s replacement.
That’s a lot of exposition for a movie that’s less interested in sci-fi or even plot than in creating space for the relationship between Hen, Junior, and Terrance to settle, bounce off the walls, and grope toward resolution.
An essential conflict emerges. Junior sees no reason to abandon the grim horizons of the farm that has been in his family for generations; longing for something more, Hen remembers she once could see a future for herself.
A dusty piano that’s kept in the farm-house basement represents a side of Hen that her marriage forced her to bury. And Junior’s name suggests a man/child who never has found a pathway to maturity.
Ronan’s performance can be both sensuous and resentful; in the showier role, Mescal dips into Junior's madness, despair and simmering rage.
Foe sets up a dynamic in which we wonder whether Terrance’s stated goals mask another agenda. A score by Park Jiha and Oliver Coates suggests deeper mysteries than the movie embraces, serving as a kind of on-going tease.
I’ve waited to pass critical judgement on Davis’s work because that’s how I experienced the movie, an unsettling waiting game that asks for a delayed response.
Foe tries to go deep but only half succeeds. It’s like a replicant of an art movie, almost convincing, but never quite hitting the thematic high notes that could have lifted it from the grey zone in which the movie, like Junior, seems stuck.
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