Academy Award nominees Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird) and Paul Mescal (Aftersun) star in this sci-fi exploration of marriage and identity. But, as Cat Woods writes, their lack of chemistry is just one of the issues plaguing a tedious pic.
Foe
Not since 2015’s By the Sea have we seen such an epic waste of acting talent in what could, and should, have been a captivating portrait of a marriage in disintegration. Foe is tedious. The banal script is heavy-handed and results in stilted, hammy overacting from both Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan. Neither character, Hen nor Junior, are in the vaguest bit likeable for the audience and , and more pertinently, why should we care?
Mescal’s Junior is horrendously boorish and as he gradually loses his mind, his horrible over-acting had me pondering if the “Internet Boyfriend” is actually the world’s most unappealing husband. If Mescal was looking to squander all the acclaim he’s received for Aftersun, this is an excellent vehicle for doing so. When Ronan read the script—co-written between director Garth Davis (Lion) and novelist Iain Reid (I’m Thinking of Ending Things), surely she could have run a mile at that point, too?
The real pity is that the concept is strong and the philosophical pressure points are entirely relatable and relevant. If we had the capacity, via artificial intelligence or otherwise, to alter our romantic partner in such a way that their annoying habits, their memories and their deepest desires were removed but their physical appearance remained identical, would we choose to “fix” them? Would we accept a “biological replica” rather than the flawed, fallible human we first fell in love with?
There was so much potential in Foe to expand on the lingua franca of the horror genre. Horror has really wriggled free of its traditional stereotype of gory, bloody violence and ‘shock! horror!’ tactics. Like Westerns, horror has diversified and extended its language to create new dialects in combination with drama, romance, sci-fi and documentary tropes. Director Garth Davis has drawn upon the expansive hybrid genres of horror, sci-fi, and relationship drama but ultimately assumed his audience are so inane that they can’t comprehend any sort of subtlety.
The true shame is that author Iain Reid’s 2018 novel of the same name has been so mishandled in translation to film, suggesting that the author tried too hard to force a novel into a script without appreciating the difference in mediums.
If you appreciate nothing else though, the landscape is gothic, sparse and beautiful. Foe was shot in Melbourne and South Australia over the early months of 2022, just as the former city emerged from a string of lockdowns. There was a sense, certainly felt by Melbourne residents (like myself) that it was a period of re-emergence, trepidation and rediscovery of our own landscape. The ideal context for a horror tale, perhaps.
Alas, it’s a horror of the unintended type. Even the creepy, slimily smooth Aaron Pierre can’t save it in his depiction of the space salesman Terrance.
The premise is deceptively simple. A married couple living on a remote farm have their lives disrupted and irreversibly thrown into tumult when a stranger, Terrance, arrives. Husband Junior (Paul Mescal) and wife Henrietta (or ‘Hen’) open their door to Terrance, who claims to be part of an aerospace corporation called OuterMore. He’s on a mission to let Junior know that he’s been chosen to board a space station for two years, “the Installation”, which is in orbit around Earth. Rather than leaving Hen alone, a biomechanical duplicate of Junior will be introduced to look after her. Obviously, to create a duplicate of Junior, Terrance will need to record as much detail of the real Junior as possible through interviews, observation and surveillance.
What becomes increasingly clear is that this is not an operation taking place between the men Terrance and Junior, but a more conflicted and troubling story of love, betrayal and duplicity between all three. Despite a seemingly idyllic marriage, Hen’s growing hunger for a life beyond the farm and Junior emerges through her candid revelations to Terrance. Watching his wife and this curious stranger spending increasing time together, Junior begins to suspect that it is not his biomechanical duplicate that is being designed to replace him, but Terrance…
Similar themes were the fodder of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If you could erase painful memories of lovers past, would you want to erase everything good and bad? It was ground also trodden in Ex Machina in which technology programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) falls in love with humanoid robot Ava (Alicia Vikander), despite initial suspicions that she is incapable of conscious thought.
The ultimate dilemma for Foe is that the concept is worthy of a short story, and could easily play out in the confines of a TV episode. David and Reid have tried valiantly to stretch their conceit into a (very mundane) film, and have—like Junior and Hen’s marriage—flunked completely.
