In the not-too-distant future, the Earth is slowly becoming inhabitable and various attempts at finding life elsewhere are being made. Junior is conscripted for a mission to a space station that will leave his wife, Henrietta, with a robotic replication of her husband. As the mission draws nearer, the couple’s fears and secrets are gradually exposed.
That a film with such an exceptional level of talent can so catastrophically misfire is the unbelievable feat Foe achieves, a piece so devastatingly bad that it not only strands two of our finest performers but makes them look actively bad in the process. A snooze fest from beginning to end, only reviving itself long enough to irritate you some more, Foe not only fumbles its strong talent but makes them look explicitly dire too.
Almost every of Foe’s issues can be attributed to its screenplay, adapted for the screen in a collaboration between Reid and Davis. A half-baked dystopian flick, the film’s logistically flawed conceit creates the unsteadiest of grounds to build upon in the first instance with squirm-inducing dialogue but does little to sturdy itself in the process, almost condemning itself just moments into its almost two-hour runtime. As a sci-fi feature, it's predictably cliched, reminiscent of a particularly dreadful episode of Black Mirror that lacks any semblance of creativity or invention; as a romance drama, it is similarly shoddy, a major structural flaw preventing the various avenues of the central relationship between Henrietta and Junior from developing with the insight and belief needed for the film’s twists and turns to land with the emotional weight its resolution so desperately needs.
There’s no denying that there’s some strong imagery littered throughout Foe, courtesy of cinematographer Mátyás Erdély. Davis has proven himself a competent director, with the first act of the Best Picture nominated Lion an emotionally swelling and delicately directed experience — but his blunt approach to Foe, spelling everything out to his audience removes any sense of intrigue they could have brought to the piece that may have kept them engaged far more than anything the film itself actually achieves. One particularly poor storytelling decision is keeping Aaron Pierre’s shadowy Terrence around, whose undefined intentions are mechanically and forcefully designed to stir the pot, once again undermining the viewer and preventing any emotion and connection we feel to these characters from arising naturally. It feels like every decision made for Foe is the wrong one, an exceptionally ghastly miss ratio that staggers in its consistent failures.
To have assembled such a shoddy piece of cinema that makes Ms. Saoirse Ronan, an actress able to elevate even the most basic of material, look poor is downright criminal. Of the two leads, she leaves Foe the least scathed, delivering the wooden material in a way that feels somewhat believable. Paul Mescal, on the other hand, is ladened with one of the most heavy-handed monologues you can imagine and, sadly, falls into every acting trap when conveying it - a snot-filled, gaudy and unbecoming turn that his immense talent has proven he is, and should, be above. The screenplay pushes him into a corner, the character so questionably written, but Mescal doesn’t fight himself out of it and instead gives himself to the overly exaggerated theatrics few actors could survive.
In case you missed the message, Foe is bad: and I say that will the exact same subtlety the film uses to convey its own themes and story. An uncreative, terribly bland and ceaselessly tepid feature that reflects poorly on everybody involved, Foe’s particularly dreadful screenplay abandons its cast with such little chance of survival that the film’s end of the world-bearing backdrop would actually serve as a small mercy. No film should let Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal look this bad and be allowed to get away with it.