Writers: Iain Reid and Garth Davis
Director: Garth Davis
Garth Davis and Iain Reid’s domestic sic-fi movie, much like Fingernails earlier in the Festival, makes tiny alterations to the familiar world we know to create an unsettling psychological tone that distorts the perspectives of its characters. Nominally a space film that also touches on AI and human synthetic replication, Foe is almost entirely based on an arid farm affected by months and years of drought in which climate change and displacement is driving the American government to look for alternative living off-world. But couched in that broad brush context is a story about marriage, loneliness and loss of control.
Together for seven years, Henrietta (known as “Hen”) and Junior have a settled but emotionally distant marriage that for Hen, at least, has lost some of its mutual spark. When Terrence arrives to inform Junior that he has been selected to live on a space station for a year as part of a pioneering programme, the couple try to enjoy their last months together before Junior leaves and a “replicant” takes his place.
Foe, set in 2065, is a rather melancholy film and while its context of planetary drought and human crisis is bleak enough, the uneven relationship between Hen and Junior becomes the focus. It is clear from the start that a frosty companionability has descended between them, Junior connected to his family’s lands and content to control the couple’s future which involves staying just where they are alone, while Hen plays the piano in the basement, away from her disapproving husband, dreaming of people, possibility and another life. And Davis creates the atmosphere of bickering, disharmony and suffocation effectively.
There are several phases to Foe; the first giving the couple a renewed life together filmed in sensual tones as they emotionally and physically reconnect. The second amps up the sci-fi quality with a series of burrowing tests conducted by Terence who inserts himself into the household like a Pinteresque device pushing the couple to confess their true feelings about each other. The final segment explores the outcome of these interactions, taking the film in an unexpected direction with a denouement that dampens the space-based driver more than the viewer might expect.
On the whole it works effectively as a psychological thriller, and while a tad overlong – fewer scenes of the couple arguing or being blissfully happy would still make the point – the tension and stakes build well, putting their connection to the test in unusual but engaging ways as the remote nature of their lifestyle that makes for an effective three-hander.
In his second feature at this year’s BFI London Film Festival, Paul Mescal has layers of wild adoration for his wife and a determination to maintain the status quo, while Saoirse Ronan’s Hen becomes increasingly emboldened as the film plays out, specialising in non-committal noises in response to uncomfortable questions and demands. David makes the dry Southern American landscape look extraterrestrial with its big crop circles and pink-tinged waters.
Even death can look beautiful, Hen exclaims but Davis’ Foe is also a quietly brutal film that is content to tear its subjects apart even if they get everything they want or at least a simulation of it.
Foe is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
