Foe! Foe! Foe! (CREDIT: Amazon Studios)

Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre

Director: Garth Davis

Running Time: 110 Minutes

Rating: R for An Intimate Relationship on Full Display

Release Date: October 6, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: It’s the future! We’ve already seen plenty of cinematic visions of the years to come, and the version in Foe is of the dystopian variety ravaged by climate change. Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) are living in a remote farmhouse in some vague portion of The Midwest in 2065. The whole area looks like a tinderbox that could be swallowed up in flames at any moment. They’re just muddling through, but then one day a stranger (Aaron Pierre) arrives with a mysterious offer. It turns out that Junior has been recruited to launch up into an orbiting space station for some important mission, and in the meantime, Hen will be kept company by a synthetic version of Junior built by artificial intelligence to replicate his consciousness.

What Made an Impression?: Where’s the Technology?: Sometimes dystopian movies feel like they take place in the past, as a catastrophic event has wiped out our most advanced forms of modern technology. That kind of seems to be what’s going on in Foe, which is weird because its premise is about a particularly timely technological breakthrough. A.I. is leaps beyond ChatGPT at this point, and yet TVs, computers, and cell phones are nowhere to be seen. It’s possible, I suppose, that Hen and Junior are choosing to live a life off the grid without modern amenities. But if that were the case, it would presumably be worth emphasizing, but it never is. And because that gap is never remarked upon, Foe is likely to give you a baseline feeling of cognitive dissonance.
Taking a While to Get There: The ending of Foe might make you want to go back and watch the whole thing again … if you have the patience for it. That conclusion assuaged some concerns I had, but it didn’t really make the ride any more thrilling in retrospect. For most of the movie, I lamented how it wasn’t taking full advantage of its premise, or quite frankly taking any advantage of its premise. And this is a story that’s been told more compellingly before, especially in the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back.” And when you get right down to it, the A.I. element doesn’t add much of anything. Sci-fi has been grappling with the ethics of cloning for decades now, and that aspect goes about how you would expect this time as well. Maybe that’s why this future looks so much like the past!

Foe is Recommended: Only for the pretty people being horny and passionate

Grade: 2 out of 5 Consciousnesses