Worth: $7.00
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Cast:
Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre
Intro:
… a load of ho-hum hokum.
Having all the right pieces on-hand doesn’t mean a whole lot, if you can’t fit them together properly. You can bring in a low-key but talented director (Lion’s Garth Davis), a compelling writer (I’m Thinking Of Ending Things’ Iain Reid in his screenwriting debut), and incomparable acting talent in Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan, and still end up with a film so terminally lifeless that it feels like an open invitation for audiences to indulge in the current overused critical cliché and wonder if this whole thing was created by an A.I. algorithm (because nothing says speaking out against unoriginality like being wholly unoriginal).
To watch this, is to bear witness to a series of things that the film desperately wants you to think are happening on-screen, but very clearly aren’t. It starts with the setting and general sci-fi impetus for the story’s bigger questions, borrowing heavily from the desolated Earth of Interstellar to present Ronan’s Henrietta and Mescal’s Junior as a struggling farmer couple living in ‘the Midwest’ but very clearly shot in the Australian Outback.
This is a coupling whose relationship tensions are meant to be the fuel for the script’s musings on love, cloning, and the self-destructive nature of humanity, and yet their chemistry is so non-existent that the symbolic beetles that scuttle across the set would’ve provided a far more engaging presence to follow.
Not since The Host has Saorise Ronan been this devoid of charisma, as if the past decade of phenomenal performances never even happened.
Ignoring how ponderous and occasionally delirious the tone is, and how hopeless the film’s attempts at speculative philosophising are (it’s a pale echo of not just the aforementioned Interstellar, but also Black Mirror’s ‘Be Right Back’, DS9’s ‘Whispers’, Reid’s own I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, Blade Runner 2049, and even aspects of Marriage Story, just to name a few), even when taken individually, the themes presented aren’t all that compelling.
There is some foundation for decent material here, bringing in questions about the nature of compromise in a relationship and how far it goes until you’re dealing with a completely different person, but because said relationship is so flat and the emotional impact is scant at best, being asked to care about what’s going on feels like an even greater challenge than building your own lifelike robot.
The most enthralling moment to be found here is Junior violently monologuing about someone else’s snotty tissues, and that’s only from the incredulity at someone trying to take this angry stoner babble seriously.
Foe is a load of ho-hum hokum. It is a feat of such transparent self-indulgence as to make Terrence Malick blush. Even with Lion and the slept-on Mary Magdalene under his belt, this is a rather depressing step-down for Garth Davis’s creative output, ditto for everyone else involved.
