Foe: Faux Portrait of a Post-Apocalyptic Marriage
By Jim Slotek
Rating: C+
There are two huge boulders of disbelief one must suspend before accepting the premise of the post-apocalyptic marriage-in-trouble movie Foe.
The first involves the fact that, despite our worst efforts, we could never eff up the planet badly enough to make any place “out there” a better option. Not Mars, not Saturn’s moon Titan (the Tom Cruise movie Oblivion), not wherever the heck Will and Jaden Smith ended up in After Earth.
Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan in Foe.
And the notion in Foe that we could simply build a space station big enough for hordes to flee a desiccated Earth for a better life in orbit is preposterous. For a tiniest fraction of a fraction of the cost, such a refuge could be built on Earth itself.
I’ll get to the second boulder in a bit. Amazon’s Foe, which opens in theatres Friday, introduces us to Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal), a couple living a listless life in an old farmhouse, surrounded by dust that used to be fields. They have a relationship that bounces between occasional tenderness and a lot of resentment.
Toilet water is occasionally reused, but they have beer, wine, solar power and even a truck. There are worse living conditions to be found on Earth now.
One day, Terrance (Aaron Pierre) a professed representative of the government, shows up to tell them that the planet-orbiting-the-planet plan is underway, and that Junior has been chosen to be one of the first aboard. But not Henrietta.
It’s promised he’ll be returned in a year or two. In the meantime, the government acknowledges that Henrietta is not safe on her own, and promises to assign a biological AI identical to her husband to keep her company.
Why? Why not just assign another human? Or, if it must be an AI, why not just a run-of-the-mill android? And are they going to all this trouble for all the significant others of their participants?
Whatever, they’re down with the plan, This involves Terrance spending considerable time with Hen and Junior, asking pointed and even perverse questions about their personalities and relationship for input’s sake, so that the eventual fake husband both looks and acts like the real thing, faults and all.
In this capacity, Terrance is the opposite of a marriage counsellor, picking at the scabs of their relationship, and driving both partners to distraction.
This day-to-day interrogation, by the way, makes up the bulk of the movie. Foe is less a sci-fi film than a psychological suspense play with three characters (one or more of whom give strong clues of being deceitful). Director Garth Davis (Lion) doesn’t have a lot of variety in his mood weaving, leaning on supposed-to-be-unsettling soundtrack, and a bit too much demented laughter.
Despite it all, Ronan and Mescal are utterly believable as a not-quite-compatible but still loving married couple, and their frustrations seem palpable.
There is, of course, an expository “twist” to this tale, about on the level of a middling episode of Black Mirror. In Iain Reid’s source-material novel, there are literary tricks that spell it out more clearly. But the script and execution here fails to launch, with too much ”Why?” holding it down.
Foe. Directed and co-written by Garth Davis. Starring Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal and Aaron Pierre. In theatres October 13.