Foe depicts the American Midwest as also being on the brink of collapse. Rain is scarce, the crops are failing, the ground is dusty, and the climate is hostile. Inside the couple’s home, government agent Terrance arrives to size up Junior’s character and motivations. The outsider’s interactions with Hen simultaneously irritate Junior and encourage her wanderlust.
If Junior is about to become faux, who in this spartan production will be the foe? The clone? The remaining partner? The agent of the state? Or some other unseen force?
Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal are moody, sweaty, distant, intimate, and full of different types of longing. There’s a strength to Ronan’s character that never stops growing though the story. When a black horse appears in a Film like this, you sense that famine and death – and maybe even Ingmar Bergman – might be just around the corner. Junior is clearly internally conflicted, ill at ease with his life, and Mescal captures this tension. Aaron Pierre portrays Terrance with a brazen knack of sticking his nose into the most personal of subjects to supposedly aid his work.
In this sci-fi adaptation of Iain Reid’s book by director Garth Davis, audiences are being taken on 110-minute journey (though it feels shorter) that has a number of sleights of hands and gaps in the timeline. To say more would spoil the film. Yet the production lets itself down and spoils its offering.
Set in 2065, Hen and Junior’s homestead is like a heritage site in a museum. Their truck is a relic. The tech in the house is ancient even by today’s standards. There’s a complete sense of isolation including a lack of communication with the outside world. All of this is at odds with the sophisticated chicken rearing vertical factory and the brief glimpses of shiny silver aircraft and the new world up in the sky. But there’s never any hint of an explanation for the old tech.
The build-up to the film’s major twist allows a number of hares to run part way around the race course, including moments when the whole space endeavour might turn out to be a spoof on the scale of Channel 4’s 2005 Space Cadets with the consequence that Terrance is going to turn into a master manipulator and sinister coercer. But then this – and other more alien possibilities – are totally discarded when the reveal arrives and we can move into Foe’s second act. By the time the second twist comes, the audience have fully caught up and it’s nearly signposted too clearly.
The couple’s love life is depicted with some regularity as a barometer of their unspoken inner feelings. The relationship portrayed by Ronan and Mescal is very believable and their on-screen chemistry is electric. About an hour into the film, the first big plot revelation also marks the pivot point when the lust, passion and enjoyment that were so well conveyed in the first half of the film now seem to require flashing more flesh. I’m no cinematic prude, but it seems like the holes in the storytelling are covered over by a needless display of bums and boobs in another example of lazy male movie industry gaze?
Towards the end, there’s very little enquiry into Junior lack of new perspective on his life upon his return from being away: for someone unexplained reason he’s even more wedded to his patch of dying land.
Foe promises science fiction and identifies a concept around which it could have crystalised a solid drama. Instead, the three strong central performances rescue the script’s incoherence and deliver a brooding psychodrama in which identity and what it means to be alive are under-explored. Foe is being screened in most local cinemas.
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