Foe movie review: scenes from an apocalyptic marriage (London Film Festival 2023)

The year is 2065, we’re told as the dusty — in more ways than one — Foe opens. Planet Earth is dying, and governmental plans are afoot to move the entire population offworld. As part of that unlikely scheme, artificial humans called simulants are being developed.

And so one evening, Terrance (Aaron Pierre: Brother) arrives at the remote farmhouse where Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan: Little Women, Mary Queen of Scots) live. He’s a representative of a corporation that is working with the government on that offworld-relocation project, and he is sorry and/or delighted to inform Junior that he has been chosen to work at an orbiting facility. Junior has been conscripted, basically: he cannot refuse. But no worries! The company will leave a simulant of Junior with Hen to keep her company while he is away in space.

Wait, what?

Now, you might think that the whole rationale for the technology of simulants would be that they could do nasty, dangerous work in orbit and elsewhere offplanet to prepare for the arrival of actual humans. (See also: Blade Runner.) I mean, that would still be horrific, because wouldn’t replicant faux-humans who are nevertheless indistinguishable from actual humans also be beings worthy of dignity and respect and pesky things like rights? Yes, it’s true that Foe — while also positing that simulants can be surrogate friends and family for those left behind so that actual humans can blast off to do that nasty, dangerous work — will just about broach such ideas… but it won’t genuinely explore them.

This becomes pretty clear pretty quickly with Foe: this is a movie like so many others, in that is ostensibly science fiction yet doesn’t have much of a grasp on the genre, not in the stories that have come before, both onscreen and in the literature, and not in the genre’s potential to explore the human condition. Frustratingly, I think it thinks it is doing the latter, but while it wants to take advantage of SF’s cachet, it seems to believe that just touching on ideas is enough, and leaves the speculation those ideas raise to thought exercises that might happen — if the audience is sufficiently engaged to keep thinking about it later, that is — after it’s done with us, after the movie is over.

And maybe that would be fine if what we do get here worked hard enough, satisfyingly enough on its own merits. Alas, it does not.

Director Garth Davis (Mary Magdalene) — who wrote the script with Iain Reid, based on Reid’s novel — is crafting a metaphor about the stagnation of a romantic relationship. It’s nice, for dystopian values of “nice,” that that is tied to cultural stagnation. See, the farm that Hen and Junior live on and are tending is a small, hardscrabble place in the American Midwest. I say “tend” and “farm,” but the only life on their land is, as far as we can see, a handful of chickens and the few still-living trees that Hen lovingly nurtures with reclaimed shower water; it hasn’t rained in years, and the landscape is beyond parched. They make their living between the work that Junior does at the massive, actually science-fictional mechanized chicken farm/processing facility that has taken over the region, and Hen’s job as a waitress at a local diner.

It’s no secret between them, or between the characters and the viewer, that it’s only Junior’s ancestral connection to the farm that keeps them there; the land and the house have been in his family for generations, and seemingly is unaltered in many decades. This is a place out of another era, an era long gone and an era that may never come again. Indeed, if we hadn’t been told the year, the temporal setting could be almost anytime from the 1940s to today. There is nothing we would consider futuristic in their home; it looks shabbily dated even to our 2020-something eyes. Which is a kind of tragedy, perhaps, and an indication of the sad cultural inertia that we’re already seeing today.

Kudos to Davis for the effective slow-collapse vibes, which also includes wildfires on the horizon and other apocalyptic weather. But that’s mere set dressing.

Junior loves the land, or perhaps only loves the family story about the land (not that we hear any stories; his grounding on the farm isn’t developed anywhere near enough). That’s what keeps him here, and there’s a metaphor in that, too, about being unable to let go of a past even when what made that work no longer applies. The thing is, though: We understand that Hen is struggling with living in this left-behind place, and fair enough. But we’re never quite sure what she saw in Junior and his farm at all, ever. There’s a metaphor in her predicament, too… but metaphors are subtext. They shouldn’t be, you know, the text.

It’s a cinematic conundrum, because Ronan and Mescal are two of the finest young actors working today, and their performances are very good. But there isn’t much chemistry between them… nor there is there much chemistry between them and Pierre’s Terrance. Bizarrely — and rather contrary to the sci-fi-ness here — Terrance will be living with the couple, for many months, so that he can observe them and learn as much as possible about their relationship in order that the Junior simulant is as realistic as possible. (Again: wait, what? If this level of involvement is required to make a single simulant, how can this possibly be done at the sort of scale that the stated intentions of the project would require?) Pierre, like his costars, is a mesmerizing screen presence… but the film squanders his power. His Terrance should be a sort of spoiler in Hen and Junior’s marriage, a challenge to them, as a charismatic third party living in their house, in their most intimate space. And he simple isn’t.

Foe makes too much of the “surprise” that, of course, given the story’s setup, one of the three characters in this stifling chamber piece will be replaced by a simulant at some point. And it makes far too little of the ramifications of that inevitability. Foe makes too much of sweaty global warming; a golden incandescence suffuses Mátyás Erdély’s (Son of Saul, The Quiet Ones) gorgeous cinematography of rural Victoria, in Australia, which stands in for the American Midwest. And it makes far too little of the horror of a dying planet. Foe insists the problems of these three little people amount to a hill of beans in their crazy world. And the movie utterly fails to convince us that they do.

viewed during the 67th BFI London Film Festival

more films like this:
• Moon [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Revolutionary Road [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Max US | Paramount+ UK]