After offering the uncooked fodder for Charlie Kaufman’s characteristically cryptic I’m Considering of Ending Issues, Canadian novelist Iain Reid serves up extra brain-bender materials in Garth Davis’ Foe. Anchored by emotionally uncooked performances from Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, with Aaron Pierre as a stranger bringing equal components seductive allure and understated menace, this brooding psychological sci-fi a couple of dying planet and a floundering marriage is initially unsettling however steadily devolves into sappiness, confusion and self-important solemnity.

A parched space of inland Australia dotted with timber like gnarled skeletons successfully stands in for the decimated American heartland within the arresting visuals of Hungarian DP Mátyás Erdély (Son of Saul). The yr is 2065, and with recent water and liveable land in brief provide, new settlements are being developed in house. That’s the place Pierre’s enigmatic character, Terrance, is available in, recruiting colonists for OuterMore, one of many firms that has now assumed the position of presidency.

For causes by no means made completely — OK, even vaguely — clear, the corporate has chosen scrappy sixth-generation man of the land Junior (Mescal) to be shortlisted for its mission to populate a purpose-built house station that can operate as its personal planet.

When the unnervingly pleasant Terrance rolls up unannounced in his glossy driverless car to the middle-of-nowhere household farmhouse the place Junior lives together with his spouse, Hen (Ronan), the couple is instantly suspicious of his discuss of local weather migration technique. Junior refuses to be part of it, however Terrance tells him conscription signifies that’s not an possibility. The stranger additionally drops the bombshell that Hen will likely be staying behind throughout the two years her husband is away.

A number of the movie’s most arresting sequences are these wherein Erdély’s digicam observes Junior and Hen of their workplaces. On condition that their scorched-earth property is a farm in title alone, Junior earns a residing at a monolithic rooster processing plant that makes manufacturing facility farming look quaint, whereas Hen waits tables in a state of dreamy distraction at a diner, a relic of earlier instances, not in contrast to the classic tunes performed on the couple’s stereo turntable at dwelling.

Even when a troubled distance has crept into their marriage after seven years, tenderness and want stay, maybe extra so since studying that Junior might be whisked away at any time. All the basis of their union is rocked, nevertheless, when Terrance returns a yr later in the midst of a mud storm. He informs them he will likely be shifting in with them for the expedited remaining part of testing, and expects them to be glad about the federal government’s compensation payout, to not point out the prospect to be a part of a history-making experiment.

It’s when the character of that experiment is revealed, and OuterMore’s priorities come into query, that Davis, who co-scripted with Reid, begins shedding his grip on the more and more contrived materials. It’s additionally when the director’s unapologetic embrace of sentimentality — which was a difficulty for some critics with Lion — turns into cloying and, in the end, a bit foolish.

It doesn’t require a blast of the 1962 Skeeter Davis country-pop crossover hit, “The Finish of the World,” to determine that Foe is much less a sci-fi investigation of company puppet masters or local weather catastrophe or extraterrestrial colonization than it’s a dystopian love story steeped within the now inescapable blight of synthetic intelligence horror. The individuals with whom we share our lives typically usually are not the identical individuals we fell in love with, however possibly science can repair that.

Simply don’t name it AI, Terrance chastens, as he — spoiler alert — explains in regards to the organic alternative that will likely be offered to maintain Hen firm whereas Junior is gone. “OuterMore has an obligation to these left behind,” he tells them with smiling reassurance, stressing that the “new sort of self-determining life kind” shouldn’t be a robotic.

Terrance’s psychological exams ceaselessly push distressed Junior over the sting, amping up the sensation of retro sci-fi paranoia. Hen is excluded from that course of, as an alternative answering detailed questions from the company interloper that reveal a lot about her intimate needs and desires and the methods wherein these have diverged from what Junior needs over the course of their marriage.

However, earlier than you’ll be able to say “Rick Deckard,” the script ushers in revelations about artificial replacements working underneath the tragic perception that they’re human.

In a single case, the reality performs out in a chilly, scientific unmasking that proves traumatic for everybody concerned. Within the different, ambiguity reigns, to a level that’s too muddy to be both intriguing or satisfying. Sure, you’ll be able to replay the movie in your thoughts and work out what’s what from clues planted all through, roughly pinpointing when the large switcheroo (or switcheroos?) befell. However as Foe lumbers on effectively into its second hour, it turns into apparent there’s barely sufficient substance right here to fill a Black Mirror episode.

The movie is saved to a point by the unstinting dedication of Ronan and Mescal, sweating it out in an surroundings that’s stifling each bodily and psychologically. However the screenplay turns into so overwrought that it smothers any emotional connection to them.

Watching Hen and Junior get it on in a dried-up lake mattress, a ravaged crop discipline or on a rickety cot at dwelling can maintain the eye for less than so lengthy, irrespective of how charismatic the actors. Mescal pours himself into an enormous anguished monologue in regards to the disgust Junior feels towards his fellow people, however even when it’s plausibly the results of Terrance tightening the screws, the speech comes extra from the writers than the character.

Simply as Ronan and Mescal (two Irish actors convincingly enjoying American) stay at all times watchable, Brit actor Pierre (The Underground Railroad) is a robust presence, his penetrating eyes and beaming grin betraying only a trace of malevolent manipulation, then revealing a chilling detachment as soon as he summons the tech crew to wrap up the experiment.

There’s loads of environment within the imagery of Erdély’s cinematography and Patrice Vermette’s bleak manufacturing design, and within the eerie sounds of a wide-ranging rating by Oliver Coates, Park Jiha and Agnes Obel. However the questions Foe is pondering — about creating human consciousness, connections, even love in synthetic replacements — are too predetermined to be provocative. Higher to look to a extra boldly imaginative consideration of the topic, like Ex Machina, for exciting solutions.