Take two of the best Irish actors working today and make them use American accents. Take a compelling premise about the intervention of climate change in domestic life and make it about robots. Take a company of extremely talented VFX artists and use them to render the same three silos shown over and over. Take some more good things and subvert them, suppress them, and run them into the ground, and then you’ll have 2023’s FOE.
The promotion for this movie presented a pretty clear image of what it would be. In a future ravaged by climate change, an American farmer named Junior (Paul Mescal) is conscripted by an aerospace corporation to live on a space station for a couple years. His wife Hen (Saoirse Ronan) will have to remain on Earth. A clear dilemma is presented: how will their marriage fair in light of the distance and separation? How will the effort to survive climate change reshape the home? Why is an increasing portion of our private life dictated by the whims of anonymous corporations?
Don’t get your hopes too far up, though – this is a movie about robots. We learn at about the 1/3 mark that the corporation in question – OuterMore – will be replacing Junior with an android clone intended to keep Hen company during her husband’s absence. Questions of identity, humanity, and intimacy are posed and pondered and repeated and rephrased, over and over.
I have to admit the questions are interesting, and the premise provides an interesting angle by which to explore them. The trouble is, Foe simply refuses to do that. It’s glad to pose these questions – what’s the difference between a human and an identical machine? Why has our fate been consigned to the will of corporate interests? – and then to pose them again, but then, in lieu of an answer, indulge for about fifteen minutes in dreamy visuals of the burnt-out landscape and our extremely photogenic stars.
There are extended conversations between the two leads about their lives, their love, and their longings, but not for a moment do these conversations rise above the twee clichés they begin as. The relationship between the characters is perplexing and not compelling, and even once you gain an insight as to why it is that way, it’s just too late to matter. And while the relationship itself could conceivably be of some interest, neither of the characters are themselves interesting enough to warrant your attention – much less your emotion.
This film falls neatly into an expanding genre of sci-fi films about life in the face of climate change, but with the genre still struggling to find its footing, it comes as no surprise that Foe just misses the mark. That the world is deteriorating rapidly is more a feature of the premise than a core element of the film, and the attempts to incorporate it into the story feel both forced and half-hearted.
Ultimately, Ronan and Mescal give it their all, and despite their considerable charm and talent, they can’t make the sinking script float. Carrying what is admittedly a very small cast, the duo has a solid chemistry and strong presence – unfortunately, their efforts are both weakened by unconvincing American accents and wasted on a dull, inert script. This comes as a particular disappointment for Mescal, a relative newcomer with a big following whose track record so far has been nearly spotless.
They aren’t the only ones bringing their A-game, though; cinematographer Mátyás Erdély treats us to some really enthralling visuals that pair nicely with an unoffensive soundtrack and effective CGI. Regrettably, these factors all conspire to draw our eyes to the screen and keep us engaged, serving to only heighten the boredom that the script so amply produces.
“A View of Earth From Apollo 11 (NASA, July 19, 1969)” by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.