Essay: Foe (2023)

A psychological thriller about the intrusion of capitalism into the lives of an unhappy couple

Foe (2023)
Directed by Garth Davis
Written by Davis and Iain Reid, based on Reid's novel

The story is set on a Midwestern American farm 50 years in the future. Agriculture and a long drought have ruined the land. Almost all the trees are dead, and sagegrass covers the countryside; periodic dust storms only add insult to injury. Any agriculture that still exists is corporate, done on a mass scale, as evidenced by a chicken factory where the coops are 50 stories tall and heavily mechanized.

Dystopian, yes, but not the dystopia of standard science fiction tropes. The setting is specific, realistic, and all too easy to understand.

Despite these conditions, a young couple is trying to live on what’s left of his family's farm. Imagine the handsome prairie houses from Kevin Costner movies, now very shabby, surrounded by wasteland. Junior (Paul Mescal) works in that inhuman chicken factory, and his wife Henrietta, called Hen (Saoirse Ronan) works in a diner. The farm has only one saving grace: somehow, the well still yields potable water for drinking and washing. Hen carefully pours greywater around the roots of a single tree she's trying to keep alive. Their five-year old marriage is crumbling under the stress of mere survival.

Clearly, they need help, and it arrives in the form of a good-looking, smooth-talking corporate representative. At least he says he's there to help, and indeed in the scenes that follow he acts as a sort of therapist, spending hours listening and counseling them together and separately. But this man, Terrance (Aaron Pierre) isn't really there to help, but to talk them into cooperating in a mysterious scheme that would take Junior away from the farm for a year. He wouldn't be leaving Hen alone; the corporation will supply an android to replace him, an exact copy. And the reason Terrance is spending so much time talking to them, and watching and recording them, is to ensure the copy of Junior will fit easily into the role.

The couple protests at first, but Terrance, his expression suddenly unsmiling, assures them they don't have a choice actually. And they seem to recognize this, because while putting up resistance to the whole thing, by merely existing they are cooperating, to an extent. Terrance is clearly unreliable; both the viewer and the couple mistrust everything from his suit to his smooth, resonant voice. This atmosphere of mistrust only adds to their stress, and as the time approaches for Junior to be taken away, their relationship and Junior's own psychic equilibrium breaks down.

To say anything more about the plot would be to reveal too much, but the script -- by the author of the novel from which it was adapted, Iain Reid, with director Garth Davis -- must follow the novel closely, because while the story is organized chronologically, like a literary novel its progression of events is dreamlike and subjective. There’s much more going on than any bare minimum a movie would need to present. What we see is subjective, from a point of view that admits only the words and actions the screenwriter and director want you to see.

This limited perspective enhances our mistrust, echoing the characters' own inability to discern what's really happening. I wasn't confused by the mysterious (not to say confusing, because it isn’t confusing, except in the way that you might be confused by your own spouse’s sudden rage at something you didn’t even notice) goings-on, because despite identifying with and feeling the characters' mistrust, I still trusted the film to resolve its threads. And I was rewarded for this by the ending, which makes you see the entire story from a different perspective where things make sense.

The characters' reactions to their situation and to each other is unpredictable and outsized; both Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan do a fabulous job of conveying their wide range of emotions, from terror to rage to moments of sweet happiness. Mescal chews the scenery a bit; Ronan is fully in control. I came away admiring her talent even more than before. As for the director, Garth Davis, this may be a breakout film for him. He manages to present the physical setting and the characters' actions in an understated, completely credible way.

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Back to the basic structure of the movie. The near-future climate-plagued setting merely accentuates the desperation of the characters' lives; they could be living in one of the places in the world that is already being devastated by climate change. There's also an aspect of the story that has to do with outer space, but it's peripheral and doesn't really make a difference. The only indispensable story element in this film, firmly placing the work into the realm of science fiction, is the prospect of hyper-realistic androids. And if you take away the android-replacement element, what's left is a movie about a couple undergoing therapy by an unreliable and indeed malevolent counselor -- a therapist who moves in with them, sometimes fights with them physically, manipulates and undermines them. In other words, a psychological horror film where love doesn't have a chance.

Given this, what does the android plot element add? Does it somehow soften the horror of the seemingly evil therapist, or make it worse? Obviously, the latter. The corporate man's ostensible mission is to ensure the happiness of the couple by capturing each of them so fully that he can transfer the whole of Junior's memories and psychology into the android and make it a fit replacement for Junior while he's away. But the effect of his presence, his words and his actions instead undermine their psyches and ruin their relationship.

Thus, the film is saying this: the intrusion of capitalism, of corporate hegemony, into the lives of individuals cannot be positive. Even when people live in almost total isolation, this intrusion is both unavoidable and poisonous, and "Foe" is an explosive condemnation of it.

Consider, then, the degree to which you and I already live in this dystopia -- not that of climate change, not the setting shown in the film, but one in which it has become impossible to live our lives without Google, Amazon, Verizon, and Walgreen's. What are these companies and their products doing to our relationships, our psyches, in return for their "free" services? If we wanted to do away with the deleterious effects of their intrusion, could we live without them?

That's the situation in which we live now. And it won't improve as the climate, and democracy, collapse. Change in all these respects has to start now -- yes, in each of our lives, but more importantly, in the ways we allow corporate hegemony to replace democracy.