Foe

In 2065, large swaths of the planet are uninhabitable, including most of the American Midwest. Still, married couple Hen (Ronan) and Junior (Mescal) cling to the patch of dead farmland that’s been in his family for generations. There they toil – him at a chicken processing plant, her at a diner – distant from other people, and increasingly from each other. That is, until a man named Terrance (Pierre) arrives to recruit Junior for a lengthy assignment as a laborer in space, part of a larger push to accelerate the move of Earth’s population off-planet. Junior has a year before the new job starts, which will allow time for psychological testing with Terrance and a slow thaw in his troubled relationship with Hen.

That’s the straightforward, spoiler-free distillation of Foe’s plot, co-adapted by novelist Iain Reid from his own novel with director Garth Davis. “Straightforward” is otherwise the last word you’d use in conjunction with the film, which intentionally obfuscates certain truths about Junior’s upcoming mission. (Charlie Kaufman adapted Reid’s debut novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things in 2020, which should give you some idea of Foe’s baffling headspace.) I gather Foe’s commitment to mystery is true to Reid’s novel; he probably wasn’t clamoring to blow up his own source material. But the result of that fealty is a cinematic game of chicken in which the filmmakers test how long they can keep their audience in the dark before pissing them off. In that game, we are all losers.

Davis’ feature career rocketed to six Oscar nominations with his first narrative film Lion, a very effective weepie starring Dev Patel, then dramatically fell back to Earth with the pretty to look at but narratively pokey Mary Magdalene. Even with the stars baked into its premise, Foe plays weirdly pedestrian. Though there are two fertile tracks happening in parallel – the seven-year itch of a husband and wife, and the dystopian considerations of climate migration, space exploration, and AI (all extremely relevant topics in 2023!). By fashioning itself a thriller above all else, Foe obstinately opts for the no-man’s land in between both tracks, in the process wasting its tiny, mighty cast, and the opportunity to say anything impactful.