Review: Foe – A Moody Dystopian Drama with Ambitious Ideas
While Foe throws around big ideas about science and our frightening future, it fails to fully develop them, resulting in a rather dull film. Stars such as Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal give it their all, but their interactions lack depth and feel artificial. Garth Davis’s dystopian drama, set in the late 2100s, paints a gloomy picture of a world ravaged by global warming. The once lush prairies of midwestern America have become dry wastelands, and population numbers have plummeted. Henrietta and Junior, the connected couple at the center of the story, live in a dilapidated house surrounded by desolation. While they manage to navigate their days with plentiful supplies of meat and Chardonnay, they can’t ignore the rainless windstorms outside their window. Junior works in a towering industrial facility that farms chickens, while Henrietta waits tables at a diner, inexplicably still attracting customers. Their lives are interrupted when a government representative named Terrence visits and informs Junior that he has been randomly selected to participate in an experiment to settle other planets due to the devastating state of Earth. This leaves Henrietta alone, and Terrence offers a radical solution – a replica of Junior, AI-controlled, to keep her company during his absence. However, this decision presents ethical and marital dilemmas, raising questions about the nature of humanity. Foe, based on Iain Reed’s book and co-written by Reed and Davis, tackles significant themes but fails to fully explore their potential. The film does a commendable job of depicting the apocalyptic setting on a limited budget, with the chicken farm being particularly convincing. Nevertheless, certain details are confusing, such as the existence of a 1990s pickup truck in a world suffering from climate collapse. Moreover, the dialogue often feels pretentious, making it difficult to connect with the central characters. Ronan manages to breathe life into her character, as she always does, floating through the film like a dystopian Ophelia. Mescal, on the other hand, struggles to fully embody his role, although a late plot twist attempts to explain this. In the end, Davis’s ambitious yet somewhat static drama resembles the dullness of Terrence Malick’s later works, failing to fully explore the intriguing ideas about science and our unsettling future. Unfortunately, I couldn’t discern why the film was titled Foe. Overall, I give it a two-star rating.
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