A dark house sits surrounded by dusty plains. A man lies asleep on the couch – maybe drunk from the night before, maybe kicked out of bed. A woman is upstairs in the shower, crying. A car’s headlights suddenly pierce through the air, breaking the sad silence. A different man – his smile much too jovial for this miserable looking pair – appears at the door with an opportunity.
The man on the couch is Junior (Paul Mescal), and the woman in the shower is Hen (Saoirse Ronan). They’re married and living in a near future when the planet has almost completely deteriorated, a harsh memory of what once was. Their life together appears unhappy and boring, until Terrance (Aaron Pierre) shines his headlights through their windows. Junior has been chosen to go to space, Terrance says, to help humanity rebuild for a new life. Hen will be left behind with a Junior-modeled, flesh-and-blood robot to keep her company while her husband is away. This information all comes to the couple quickly, but they have a while to prepare – Junior must undergo intense psychological and physical testing before taking his journey.
Everything about this opening scene from Garth Davis’s new film “Foe” feels slightly wrong, from the dialogue, to the framing, to the performances. That unsettling quality underscores the rest of the movie, based on the Iain Reid novel of the same name and with a screenplay written by Reid and Davis. It puts you on edge, hypersensitive to every shift in the dynamic and constantly asking yourself, what exactly is happening here? Davis is quite good at creating that atmosphere of mystery, but not capitalizing on it. “Foe” gives away the game almost immediately, losing focus as it aimlessly builds to a devastation that it can’t deliver on.
“Foe” feels like it takes place somewhere in Middle America, but there’s nothing really American about it. Filmed on location in Australia, the barren landscape that surrounds Hen and Junior feels impossibly wide and much too empty. Mescal and Ronan are both Irish actors doing vague, location-less American accents. Pierre is English, and keeps an English accent throughout. The combination of all of these “wrong” choices is effective at creating an unsettling air. Everything hurts your teeth a little bit – there’s something not quite right about what you’re seeing and hearing, but everything is so slightly askew that it’s hard to pinpoint where the problem lies.
Until it isn’t. The screenplay shows its hand quite quickly, so by the time you’re told why everything feels so wrong you’ve already figured out the play. That’s not inherently a bad thing – in Reid’s book, there is a pretty large tell as to what is actually going on with Hen and Junior, if you know where to look – but the way the script is structured loses all of its climax’s emotion.
The movie is loosely separated into two sections, the first more from Hen’s point of view before shifting into Junior’s head as Terrance begins to evaluate him. Considering the end of the film, it’s tough to spend that much time separated from Hen. The last half of the movie and the ostensibly devastating ending hinge so much on her feelings, but we barely see her in that span of time. Instead, what we see of her is through the lens of Junior’s paranoia.
Much of the last half of the story focuses on Junior’s psychological testing, which is filmed in such a way that doesn’t really feel psychological or visceral in any sense of those words. Mescal goes big in these moments, but his outsized reactions don’t feel warranted by the tests that we see onscreen. The film tries to build up Junior’s paranoia, a sense that perhaps Terrance is the one who will be keeping Hen company while Junior is away instead of a robot. But, although Pierre does have a deliciously dangerous appeal, the film’s pacing and structure never lets that idea percolate.
Pierre delivers the best performance in the film, his smile a bit too wide, his eyes a bit too tight around the edges as they glitter with something akin to glee while Hen and Junior’s marriage is put to the test. Mescal, however, feels slightly miscast as a rough and tumble, maybe slightly dumb, midwestern American. Perhaps that casting adds to the film’s eerie atmosphere, and he does carry the weight of that strangeness well. But both he and Ronan – particularly Ronan – are asked to play these massive emotional moments that the script gives them no space to build up to. There’s no real psychological inspection in this psychological thriller, which seems much more intent on disorienting and obfuscating something the film has already given away rather than digging around in its character’s heads.