Director – Garth Davis, Screenplay – Garth Davis & Iain Reid, Based on the Novel Foe (2018) by Iain Reid, Producers – Iain Canning, Garth Davis, Kerry Kohansky-Roberts & Emile Sherman, Photography – Matyas Erdely, Music – Park Jiha, Oliver Coates & Agnes Obel, Visual Effects Supervisor – Jay Hawkins, Visual Effects – Alt.VFX, Special Effects Supervisor – Arlo Markantonatos, Production Design – Patrice Vermette. Production Company – Anonymous Content/I Am That/See-Saw Films.
Cast
Saoirse Ronan (Hen), Paul Mescal (Junior), Aaron Pierre (Terrance)
Plot
The American Midwest in the year 2065. Earth has become environmentally devastated and humanity has started to relocate into space. Hen and Junior are a couple working a farm in dustbowl conditions. They then receive a visit from Terrance, an operative from the OuterMore corporation. Junior has been selected as a candidate to spend the next two years on one of their space stations. Junior is upset and does not want to be parted from Hen. Terrance then informs him that a substitute will be made of Junior to keep Hen company while Junior is gone. Terrance then moves in with them so as to learn all that he can to program the substitute, but this comes to upset Junior.
Foe (2018) was the second novel from Canadian writer Iain Reid. Reid had first appeared with I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2016), which was filmed by Charles Kaufman as I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), a film that was celebrated as much as it had everybody puzzling over its’ meaning. The film version of Foe was taken up by Australian director Garth Davis, previously known for Lion (2016) and Mary Magdalene (2018) – according to the trailer for Foe he is supposed to be a ‘visionary filmmaker’. The film was shot in Australia. Iain Reid co-writes the screenplay with Garth Davis.
Garth Davis shoots a very nicely photographed film. The house in the middle of the dustbowl recalls something of the award-winning cinematography in Terrence Malick’s masterwork Days of Heaven (1978). Some of the finest scenes come when Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal go on a journey, crossing vast landscapes of pink desert with lovemaking amid the abandoned frames on some farm, before returning to the almost surreal image of horses fleeing as a barn burns behind them. At least this is probably the closest modern desaturated photography and colour processing will ever get to a Malickian film, where much of the potential is killed by rendering everything in dun neutral colours stripped of all vibrancy.
Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal)
The other thing that worked against Foe for me (and it would seem most audiences) was that it left me confused. This is something to be expected of an Iain Reid work. Foe is not a film where the plot happens from A to B and everything is clearly spelled out for an audience. The central drama is that Paul Mescal is recruited to go into space – more a case of conscripted – but does not want to leave Saoirse Ronan. Recruiter Aaron Pierre moves into the house and interrogates Paul Mescal so as to get a profile for the substitute and asks very probing and personal questions about their relationship. Mescal even delivers a long anecdote about co-workers that eat their sandwiches mashed into a goo and about human bodily fluids, which I could not discern a point to.
Where it becomes confusing is that towards the end there is the Conceptual Reversal Twist [SPOILERS ALERT] where it is revealed that Paul Mescal has been the substitute for some time. It is not clear for how long. For that matter, it is not even clear what a substitute is – an android or some type of clone. I went back over the film but for the life of me could work out at what point we were seeing the real couple and at which point there was the substitute present. Quite possibly this is intentional. Iain Reid pulls the same kind of reality bending confusion of identity in I’m Thinking of Ending Things but here it failed to accrue the same sort of buzz and fascination around the film and just ended up leaving audiences confused.
