REVIEW: Foe (2023)
Tense, emotional climate science-fiction that doesn’t quite come together
by Kevin Fox, Jr.
This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Foe is a psychological thriller that relies on one of speculative fiction’s most familiar anxieties: humanity being replaced. The film is climate fiction, taking place in a world that’s finally experiencing the environmental disaster that we’ve been collectively fearing for the last 20 to 50 years. It takes place in the intermediate specificity of “The Midwest,” and within the tighter specificity of the year 2065. This ravaged Earth is a crucial detail for spurring the plot into motion, but dwelling on the plausibility of Foe‘s vision of the future would only distract from the story. Some parts work better than others, and the simplicity of the structure gives it a speculative short-story quality that hampers its intimacy with awkwardness
Propelling the film is the romantic drama between Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal), a married couple that lives an outdated lifestyle that hearkens back to a past from which they draw their shared identity. Junior represents conservatism, cynicism, even cowardice masquerading as realism. Hen, on the other hand, breathes and speaks of the unfulfilled and the unknown; she is cloistered and squandered. Catalyzing the drama between these two small-town lovers in a rut of routine is Terrance, played by Aaron Pierce. Terrance is a representative of “Outermore,” an organization that has built a space station where people are being sent for field testing in anticipation of humanity’s apparently imminent vacation from the planet. Junior has been recruited at random and, in the meantime, Outermore is going to leave an organic copy (something like a Blade Runner replicant), the creation of which will require Terrance’s close, prodding observation of both Junior himself and his interactions with Henrietta.
The couple is given more than a year to prepare, but they seem to cram all their reconciliation into the last few weeks. The dialogue between them is delivered with sufficient emotion, but written with insufficient punch. It quickly becomes clear that the underlying conflict in their relationship is that they married very young and settled into a life where Henrietta is disappointed with her limited prospects, while Junior keeps her locked away to use as his crutch. (Junior is also afraid to leave his family’s ranch, even though they no longer work the land.)
In some ways, Foe is a critique of the fear of progress, with a particular focus on its human cost. More literally and directly, it’s about the problems that can arise when communication breaks down between a couple and how that festering can undo an otherwise stable foundation. Henrietta is set up to be easy to empathize with from the very beginning, when she expresses concern that Junior doesn’t even really see her anymore. Junior, meanwhile, becomes more empathetic—and Mescal’s performance more captivating—as the film approaches his imminent departure for space and his mental state begins to deteriorate. The depiction of Junior and Henrietta’s interactions with Terrance, the investigator, develops an awkwardness and strangeness that, charitably, might be an attempt to depict the trauma of the situation—or, less generously, the result of either unfocused direction on the part of Garth Davis or imprecise writing by Davis and Iain Reid (who wrote the novel on which the film is based, and here shares screenwriting credit with Davis).
Foe is a critique of the fear of progress, with a particular focus on its human cost.
Foe does truly shine in a few places. Its ability to capture landscapes for scene-setting through overhead shots, for instance, is glorious to behold. Cinematography (Mátyás Erdély) is an obvious and apparent strength. As far as the visual design of the setting goes, everything looks believably just-over-the-horizon, neither the day after tomorrow nor indescribably distant. The mass factory farms seem plausible; the one-world corporation-government, somewhat less so. The state of the environment is likewise plausible—the lack of rain over extended periods may be unlikely, but it’s at once both coherent and narratively, as well as thematically, resonant.
That said, the film struggles to thread the needle between essence and distraction when it comes to the reality of the setting. The result is something briefly captivating, but ultimately imperfect. The practical and computer-generated are composited well together, and married rather seamlessly. It’s just that, at the risk of sounding like a craven minimalist, the entire backdrop feels extraneous despite the entire premise resting on it. We engage intimately with the characters, but their home lives are too intentionally old-fashioned for the setting’s chronology to matter as anything but a set up for the plot, even as the bygone aesthetic conveys the rut and dissatisfaction of their lives.
The farmhouse—with its 20th century interior—is likewise conceptually acceptable, if not exactly riveting. Not every film needs to be a showcase for the most brilliantly realized far-out future, and Foe‘s bland normativity effectively conveys the idea that resource hoarding and economic stratification still exist even amid climate apocalypse (to no one’s great surprise). The loneliness that pervades the setting and the lives of the characters eventually gives the impression that knowledge is being somewhat clumsily withheld from the audience—but, at the same time, it’s highly effective at producing a sort of sympathetic paranoia within the audience.
Ultimately, Foe is a movie about false promises, lost trust, and lost hope, delivered by the confusion, mystery, and drama of failed romance. It’s shot through with the makings of a science-fiction psychological thriller; one full of anxiety about surveillance, interloping institutions, and the replaceability of real humanity by the artificial and fabricated. But while the moments of physical and emotional intimacy help establish greater emotional stakes between the characters, the climactic reveal renders some of the romantic depth fragile. Still, the payoff is mostly worthwhile; it leads to a fittingly somber ending, even if it then undoes that success through redundancy, squashing its carefully constructed ambiguity.
The ending is particularly troublesome in that respect. Sometimes, a movie’s multiple concluding sequences can give the audience a sense of receiving a culmination of ideas, one which shows the strength of the filmmakers involved. In Foe, however, the repetition is so obvious that it mostly just leaves you thinking, “Wrap it up, okay? We get it.”
In the end, Foe is far from the most tedious or eye roll-inducing film you could see this year, but it definitely wore out its welcome in the final act, showing—if not a lack of self-confidence from the filmmakers—a lack of confidence in the audience’s ability to understand the themes and narrative they’ve just watched for 100 minutes. It’s neither disaster nor abomination, but it’s a fundamental error to make a film that relies so heavily on ambiguity, only to abruptly toss that ambiguity aside, as if the audience simply can’t keep up. It’s a move that ultimately, and paradoxically, feels simultaneously uncertain and overly obvious.
Kevin Fox, Jr. is a freelance writer constantly seeking new books, games, movies, and shows to add to his considerable backlog. He has an MA in History and has also been published in Paste, People's World, and Vague Visages. He can be found on Twitter @kevinfoxjr.
