The next time you’re in a movie theater – just as the credits start to roll – close your eyes and try to imagine the various emotions generated by your fellow audience members. Do you feel any excitement? Confusion? Disappointment? Elation? There’s a collective hum that emanates from an impassioned audience when a work of art provokes strong reactions. Such was the case with Garth Davis’s Foe, which amongst a crowd of critics at the 61st New York Film Festival on September 28th, incited utter and complete contempt. To be clear, though Foe isn’t particularly good, it also isn’t that bad. It’s necessary to state this outright because the outsized negative appraisal of the film somewhat resembles, at least to this critic, the act of kicking a sick puppy while it’s down. Sometimes you can have all the elements for something great, but a film simply doesn’t work. In this sense, dissecting what’s fallen short in Davis’ ambitious vision is less about vigorously hacking apart what’s already dead-on-arrival, and instead investigating its exquisite corpse with a finely pointed scalpel.
The screenplay, co-written by Davis and original novelist Iain Reid, who also wrote 2016’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things (adapted to film by Charlie Kaufman in 2020), is certainly at no shortage of compelling ideas. The issue is, if you think of concepts like colors, then mixing too many of them together can result in an ugly brown. The somewhat engaging but messy Foe steals from many sources, whether that be Solaris, Ex Machina, Black Mirror or even Interstellar, but it never manages to coalesce these disparate threads into a cohesive, or even particularly original, picture. Set in the near future, opening text informs us that the planet’s resources have dwindled, and that humanity may soon necessitate a move to outer space. Not only that, but much of humankind’s workforces have been replaced with robotic clones, especially in industrial and agricultural industries like farming and factories. Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) are a young couple living modestly amongst these bleak surrounds, until their farmhouse is visited one night by a mysterious man, Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who brings with him a troubling revelation: Junior has been conscripted by a powerful corporation to spend a year in space, while Henrietta will be left accompanied by an engineered clone of her husband as company.
To say the least, everything is not as it seems. Despite its rather elaborate sci-fi worldbuilding, Foe is mostly a domestic drama, and a talky one at that. Characters spend a lot of time looking at the stars, but they don’t spend much time actually going to them. Even if audiences assuage their expectations of the film’s initial pitch, they may end up feeling stranded in Davis’ claustrophobic vision. The contained nature of his film wouldn’t necessarily be an issue if it wasn’t so clumsily paced, and if the screenplay didn’t spend so much time confusing thematic redundancy with profundity. As it is, most of Foe feels like portentous buildup for very little payoff, a beleaguered trip to a faraway planet that’s actually made out of wet cardboard. Far too many details of this world simply don’t make sense. Why, for instance, is the diner Henrietta works at somehow always full of customers despite opening text informing us that Earth has become a dreary and desolate landscape? If robotic clones have taken over the industrial workforce, then how does Junior still work at a chicken harvesting factory? One of the film’s most memorable images shows Junior looking up and seeing a massive space station painted across the night sky, but the captivating details of Foe’s world never amount to much more than window dressing.
What keeps Foe going is the performances. Mescal is one of the most fascinating actors working today, and has a sensitive, pent-up energy about him that makes him consistently compelling to watch on screen. As Junior, the young Irish actor is given quite a few chances to shine, including an unnerving and drunken monologue about bodily fluids that sticks as one of the film’s most memorable scenes. Ronan, too, does more than enough with a role that’s slightly underneath her station since her character’s otherwise enthralling arc is given short thrift to the screenplay’s underwhelming twists. The two actors have considerable chemistry, and if you can’t buy into the world, you can at least buy into their relationship. The film is at its best when simply allowing these characters to interact, playing off the natural tensions that their existentially bizarre predicament would instill in an already troubled marriage. Add in a carefully modulated and sinister turn from Pierre, and Foe more or less entertains for two-thirds of its runtime, a bit self-serious, but nevertheless beautifully shot and strangely compelling. One should concede that Davis constructs some undeniably compelling images that speak louder than he and Reid’s languorous screenplay ever could.
Still, there’s nothing worse than a film insisting that it’s two steps ahead of the audience when it’s actually several yards behind. Not only is Foe’s final-final reveal obvious, but it spends at least 15 minutes reiterating said “twist” just to make sure you really got it (hint: we do). It’s around the time that the film nonsensically needle-drops Skeeter Davis’ “The End of the World” that most of the audience’s eyes will likely have rolled to the back of their heads, and it can’t really recover much from there. Give Davis points for ambition. This isn’t an offensively dull piece of trash like The Exorcist: Believer or The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and noble failures are always preferable to mediocre line-drives. But it’s difficult not to feel like, with the talent involved, this could’ve been much, much better. Perhaps on paper, this story felt as stark and bleakly evocative as the forsaken world that surrounds Junior and Henrietta. On screen, it’s like a million things you’ve seen before.
Photo courtesy of Amazon Studios
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