Review: FOE

Young married couple Hen and Junior live on their lapsed farm in a near future when water is more precious than cobalt and people are being encouraged to move off world. A stranger knocks on their door and tells them that Junior is to be conscripted into the space program. The pair was already drifting and now with enforced separation they are compelled to reassess their situation. Later, the stranger returns and lets them know that Junior will be replaced by an AI version of Junior. Huh?

If their shared introspection before took them into depths unaccounted for, now they are going to need  some serious shared experience to get to the furthest depths of their lives, what they mean and what each is to the other. And then it gets complicated.

That's as plotty as I'll get in this review. There are twists here and some of them are backward-folding and I'm just not going to navigate that. this film is about asking what we want from our lives. Hen and Junior examine what made them a couple. As they variously resist and welcome the solid changes that face them they are left with more questions than answers. If the conclusion doesn't make you think about every single longer term relationship you've had then you need to go back and watch it again. It will please some greatly and probably disgust others. This only glances at the notion of possession, it blossoms into much more of a life definition tale. That's where it gets dangerous.

Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, bearing the burden of almost all of the screen time, convince us of a couple whose bonds are held in great fragility, as physical as vocal. Their interplay frequently approaches dancing. At the film's best, this is a pas de deux of tension, of rediscovery, of attraction and revulsion. Aaron Pierre who is far sexier than anyone from a government agency ever could be, plays up his jazzy suavity, frequently crossing lines that increasingly look like tests. This is a story where sensuality comes with a grimace.

It reminded me strongly of a film that, while it tackles a different subject, commits to its odd narrative to the point where a sudden leap into a mental reframing is essential to keep watching. This doesn't have to be a violent shift, just an acknowledgement of the change and a readiness to return. Denis Villeneuve's similarly titled Enemy, uses a doppelganger figure and the spectre of spiders where Foe keeps it tidier with an AI clone but the pair of films both keep their focus on life choices and the workings of notions like love and bonding. The difference is that Enemy, for all its abstractions and looseness of connection between the real and the allegorical, is a tightly told story. Foe isn't. If I were being mean I'd say that Foe was Enemy as remade by Terrence Malik. But I'm not inclined to risk revealing things about Foe or damning it with a cheap quip, so I won't.

Foe is too long. The scenes of its conclusion are concise and eloquently stated in cinematic form but we are given too much repetition of information with too little nuance to distinguish one iteration from the next. This works well if the scenes of shared adventure are considered a dance but the film doesn't quite commit to that. To say it's too long, though, is not to call it boring, only that it lacks economy with its points. This might be a problem of the source material: the film was being adapted before it was published and the author of the novel was a writing partner. It's hard to say. What I can say is that by the time I got to the credits I was not surprised by the conclusion but nor was I robbed by it. Recalling the good bits, the same way Hen and Junior do with their own history, I felt it found its justice where others would definitely not.