Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Foe’ on Amazon Prime Video, in Which a Sci-fi Dystopia Disrupts Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal’s Troubled Marriage

The world is dying and so is the marriage between Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in Foe (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video), which isn’t quite the most uplifting movie you’ll see this year. This melodramatic sci-fi psychological thriller is from Lion director Garth Davis, adapting the novel of the same name by Iain Reid, who also wrote I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which became one hell of a movie in the hands of filmmaker Charlie Kaufman. Foe is also one hell of a movie, albeit in a different way, and yes, that means it’s not nearly as good as I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Here’s why.

FOE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hen (Ronan) stands in the shower, weeping. Is it a deeply personal weeping or an existential weeping? One assumes both. It’s 2065, and the way-overpopulated planet is on its way out. Water is scarce, it hasn’t rained in god knows how long, there’s not much habitable land left, AI robots are replacing humans for manual labor, everyone’s looking to WALL-E their asses right off Earth and why is she taking such a long, sad shower if there isn’t much water to go around? I dunno! She and hubby Junior (Mescal) live on an 200-year-old farm in a middle-of-nowhere flatland occasionally battered by billowing dust storms of the type that has us wondering if Mad Max lives just up the road a stretch. 

Nothing grows here but scrub and despair, the latter of which has crept into Hen and Junior’s seven-year marriage. They’re always a little dewy with sweat from the persistent heat, which hangs in the air whether they’re cold to each other or doinking the bejeezus out of each other – such is the rollercoaster of a troubled relationship. There’s contempt and resentment between them, and their isolation from the rest of the population only intensifies the love lost. They joylessly drink a bit too much beer and wine, and simmer in their misery. She waits tables at a diner and he works at an industrial chicken factory and at this point you’re shaking your head at how her name is Hen and she lives on a farm and he works in a chicken factory. Does that mean something? Thematically speaking, maybe, but it for sure means I’m annoyed.

One night, a vehicle that looks like a third- or fourth-gen Cybertruck pulls up to the house. It’s Terrance (Aaron Pierre of The Underground Railroad), a kind of mysterious government guy who informs Junior that he’s been drafted to live on a space station. Terrance gives a heavy-handed sales pitch, if only to soften the notion that Junior has no choice in the matter. Is it good news or bad news that they’ll be separated for a while? Not sure. But the juice here is, Junior will be replaced by a “self-determining life form,” which is doublespeak for “will you even be able to determine which one of them is the clone.” Maybe this kind of thing happens all the time, or maybe Junior and Hen are guinea pigs here, who can tell? This reality is bleak. I mean, there’s dystopia out there in the heat, and dystopia in here between the sheets, but is there any hope-ia for Junior and Hen or humanity itself?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mahershala Ali came face-to-face with his replacement clone in the similarly maudlin Swan Song (which is far more worthy of your time than this). The Host (absolutely not the Bong Joon-ho The Host) was Ronan’s previous gig anchoring cloddish sci-fi. And Foe cribs more than a little from Never Let Me Go and the two Blade Runners.

Performance Worth Watching: Ronan and Mescal are past Oscar nominees, absolutely worthy ones, and that’s evident in how they work their tails off to try to transcend this garbled and ineffective screenplay.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s strange how dying can be beautiful,” Hen says, as she and Junior share a loving moment in a gorgeously pink salt-flat wasteland

Sex and Skin: A fair amount of sweaty-moany soft-R nookie, with occasional shirtlessness and bare bums.

Our Take: The key question here is, are we buying any of this? Ronan and Mescal can sell us nearly anything, and there are moments when they turn up enough emotional truths to give Hen and Junior’s thorny relationship some dramatic heft. They cultivate believable intimacy and efficaciously walk the line between love and loathing – and make sure Foe isn’t as dry and barren as its setting. 

But there also are moments that don’t do the talent any favors: Ronan is asked to venture into a basement and pull the cover off a piano and therefore indulge a hoary cliche about smothered joy and creativity, and Mescal’s histrionic soliloquy about pus and snot and other bodily grossnesses is an unintentional laffer, maybe even for the ages. Meanwhile, the Terrance character acts strangely enough that we start to wonder if he’s a “self-determining life form” within the plot, or a self-determining Movie Character specifically calculated to never let us get a firm grip on him and therefore keep us from getting too comfortable; he’s warm, he’s cold, he’s almost-but-not-quite nice, and he seems to be going through a whole lot of trouble for, what, exactly? A weirdly cruel experimental government program? Wouldn’t it be easier to just send them both to outer space than to take one and make a clone and needlessly eff with everyone’s heads?

Considering the story is set on such an arid and lifeless plain, its inability to hold much water is Foe’s only functional metaphor. Davis indulges a few moments of visual beauty, capturing desolate landscapes with undertones of melancholy grief. He also delivers a few surrealistic flourishes that hammer us with hackneyed symbolism – a wandering horse, a burning barn, an is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex dream sequence. This unwieldy melange of psycho-thriller and antiutopian sci-fi aims to be suggestive but lands somewhere between confused and obtuse, hot-messing its way to a third act that offers the type of explanations that grind most movies to a halt, but are welcome here, because at that point, our frustration has set in. Kudos to Davis for not wanting to spoon-feed anyone, but, to mix the shit out of a metaphor, he also leaves us lost in the woods. So often, we yammer on about how movies do and don’t “work,” and Foe is a prime example of this, its array of potent components never coming together to create a functional narrative.

Our Call: Foe tries to be a head trip, but ends up being a head scratcher. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.