Foe

Put Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in a room together and you usually get sparks; put them in a decaying farmhouse in the year 2065, and you get a slow-motion car crash of the soul. On paper, Foe should have been the heavy-hitter of 2023. It had the prestige pedigree of director Garth Davis (who directed Lion) and a script based on a novel by Iain Reid, the man who gave us the delightfully trippy I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Yet, despite the star power, the film arrived with a whisper and vanished into the depths of the Amazon Prime library faster than a deleted browser history.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while my neighbor was outside power-washing their driveway for three hours, and I’ll admit, the rhythmic drone of the water actually blended quite well with the film’s ambient, droning score by Agnes Obel. Foe is a film that demands your patience, then tests it, then asks if it can borrow twenty bucks and your sense of identity.

The Star Power Paradox

The setup is classic high-concept sci-fi. Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) are living a hardscrabble life on a parched piece of family land. Earth is dying, the water is gone, and the corporations are looking toward the stars. Enter Terrence (Aaron Pierre), a suave representative from a company called OuterMore, who arrives like a sinister traveling salesman to tell Junior he’s been drafted to work on a space station. The catch? To keep Hen company, they’re going to replace Junior with a "biomechanical" duplicate—an AI clone that looks, talks, and smells like her husband.

If you’re thinking this sounds like a feature-length Black Mirror episode, you’re not wrong. However, where Black Mirror usually goes for the jugular, Foe prefers to sit in the kitchen and stare intensely at a glass of water. Paul Mescal is the undisputed king of looking devastated in a wife-beater tank top, and he brings that raw, trembling vulnerability here in spades. Saoirse Ronan, meanwhile, does incredible heavy lifting with a character who feels perpetually trapped. Their chemistry is the only thing keeping the movie from floating away into the stratosphere of pretension.

A Future That Feels a Bit Too Dusty

Visually, Garth Davis avoids the sleek, chrome-plated future we usually see. Instead, he leans into "Dust Bowl Chic." It’s an interesting choice that reflects our current climate anxiety—a world that isn't exploding, just slowly drying up and blowing away. But the film’s pacing is, to put it bluntly, glacial. "Foe" is basically a high-budget stage play that forgot to check its watch, often circling the same three arguments in the same wood-paneled rooms until you start rooting for the AI replacement just to see a different facial expression.

I found myself wondering if the film’s obscurity is a result of it being caught in the "streaming dump" phenomenon. Released by Amazon/MGM, it had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it theatrical run before being relegated to an algorithm. In the current era of franchise dominance, a weird, mid-budget psychological drama needs to be either a masterpiece or a viral sensation to survive. Foe is neither. It’s a somber, well-acted curiosity that feels like it belongs in a time capsule labeled "2020s Nihilism."

The Twist in the Bio-Mechanical Tail

Without spoiling the final act, the film takes a hard turn that recontextualizes everything you’ve seen. It’s a polarizing ending—one that makes sense if you’ve read Reid’s book, but feels a bit like a "Gotcha!" moment on screen. This movie treats its audience like they’ve never seen a twist coming since 1999, and while the actors sell the hell out of the revelation, the script struggles to make the emotional payoff feel earned.

Interestingly, the film was shot in the Winton Wetlands in Victoria, Australia, which stood in for the American Midwest. The production had to deal with actual environmental challenges, including a landscape that was meant to be "dead" but kept springing back to life due to unexpected rainfall—a bit of irony for a film about a dying planet. It’s that kind of behind-the-scenes struggle for authenticity that shines through in the cinematography, which is arguably the film's strongest suit alongside the performances.

In the end, Foe is a film I’m glad I saw, but I’m not sure I’d ever want to sit through it again. It’s a fascinating showcase for Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan, who prove they can make even the most repetitive dialogue feel like a Shakespearean tragedy. If you’re a fan of slow-burn sci-fi that prioritizes feelings over phasers, it’s worth a look on a rainy (or power-washed) evening. Just don’t expect it to be the "instant classic" the trailer promised. It’s a beautiful, flawed, and ultimately lonely movie that says more about the fragility of human marriage than it does about the future of space travel.