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Join UsStar Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, and Aaron Pierre
Director: Garth Davis
What’s Good: Ronan and Mescal are young and beautiful, and the premise is intriguing.
What’s Bad: The film needs to learn how to use its premise efficiently, and neither lead has chemistry.
Loo Break: There are a lot of loo breaks in here as the film goes for the slow-burn method but doesn’t know when to drop the bomb and how the climax should affect the rest of the film.
Watch or Not?: It would be best to avoid this for more exciting and compelling romance or science fiction films.
Language: English (with subtitles).
Available On: Amazon Prime Video
Runtime: 111 Minutes.
User Rating:
To create a romantic film is to be sure that you can establish, develop, and showcase a human relationship based on love, passion, trust, and every other negative feeling that comes with it. Cinema, books, and television have taken inspiration from that well for countless decades, and so comes Garth Davis, trying to showcase such a relationship under the lens of a science fiction story, and the result is a movie that has a fantastic cast but doesn’t really manage to present its ideas clearly enough.
Foe Movie Review: Script Analysis
Foe is a romance movie but also a science fiction movie; we are told the story of a couple living in the future, away from the cities, and in a version of planet Earth that has become entirely uninhabitable. To save humanity, different programs to send people to space have been established, and so one of our main characters, Junior, discovers he has been chosen for one of them, and he cannot refuse. This premise ignites discussions and confrontations between him and his wife, Hen.
This premise sounds fantastic on paper, but when you actually see how Davis is executing the story, you will be left with tons of questions that can be answered by yourself after watching the movie, but knowing that it would have been so much better to actually see a proper relationship being established and then destroyed in front of us, a complete experience. As it is now, the film feels incomplete, as if it shows the story’s ending and leaves all the essential parts that came before it.
This sense of being incomplete leaves the movie’s third act in limbo, which never recovers. The film tries to come up with a clever twist, but for those of us who have watched tons of science fiction movies and TV shows, the twist becomes entirely predictable, so part of the audience will be there waiting for the characters to catch up to them, which is not very compelling.
This decision about where to start the story also leaves us needing a proper setup of what is at stake. We are told many times, but we are never appropriately shown what would happen if Junior goes and what would be lost, and with this part of the story, there can be emotional resonance. As the movie ends, it becomes hard to understand the film’s purpose, and sadly, I have to interpret this hollowness as a deficient execution and not an intentional void made by the storytellers.
Foe Movie Review: Star Performance
Foe is all about Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal. Both actors are young, and they look great in the film. On top of that, they are both Academy Awards nominees, which gives the movie a label of quality of sorts, which is why the movie feels even more lame than it should. While both actors do a great job with the material they were provided, the material itself is not strong enough, so their relationship never feels believable.
Aaron Pierre comes as the third wheel in the relationship, and he fares better than the other two actors because he doesn’t need to have chemistry with anyone or have the need to sell a romantic relationship; he is there to be the antagonist, and he does a great job at it. The fact that in some scenes, Ronan seems to have more chemistry with Pierre than Mescal makes the entire film fall apart.
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Foe Movie Review: Direction, Music
Davis’ direction feels a bit self-conscious as if he knows the story is not that deep or grand by itself, and so he needs to elevate it by making the film feel like a copy of a Terrence Malick film, with shots and scenes that have that “wandering” style that characterized Malick in his latest works. Davis might try, but he can only reach that style by stumbling into his premise, which sounds compelling but needs to be appropriately explored.
There are a couple music cues here and there that bring a bit of life into the film, but other than that and some piano pieces played by Ronan’s character, the music feels entirely forgettable, just like the rest of the movie. This film could have been so much more, but it never starts, and when it ends, you can feel that there is so much left unsaid, and not in a good way.
Foe Movie Review: The Last Word
Foe is 2024’s first disappointment; it makes sense why the film never created a buzz in the festival circuit and was just dumped on Amazon Prime Video. The premise’s potential could be better spent on a romance that doesn’t feel real and a twist that doesn’t manage to put everything we saw before in a new context. The cinematography and the atmosphere are lovely, but this could have been so much more in every department.
Foe Trailer
Foe releases on October 06, 2023.
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