Androids, space missions, dystopian wastelands — Foe doesn’t exactly sound like it’s rewriting the science-fiction manual. What other sci-fi movies don’t have, however, is a smoking-hot screen couple such as Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal.
They play Henrietta and Junior, a wife and husband living in an isolated farmhouse 40 years in the future. One day a charming stranger called Terrance (the British actor Aaron Pierre) arrives to tell them that Junior is being sent on a compulsory off-world mission for two years, during which time he will be replaced by an identical cyborg. It doesn’t go down well.
The scenario will be familiar to anyone who has seen the Black Mirror episode Beyond the Sea — although Foe is based on a book published way before that, in 2018. Yet its Australian director Garth Davis (Lion, the Dev Patel weepie; Mary Magdalene) is less interested in the increasingly familiar hot potato of artificial intelligence than he is in the relationship between Hen and Junior and how it changes in the year leading up to his departure.
That’s where the film sings and it’s largely down to Ronan and Mescal. They give us the lot: tenderness and jealousy, joy and devastation, agonised silences and intense sex scenes. The old-fashioned house has no air conditioning, so it gets sweaty.
What Davis didn’t know when he cast the Oscar-nominated pair was whether such magnetic performers would attract or repel each other. “I want to work with the best actors in the world but I want it to feel natural, which is always tricky,” he says, speaking at his publicist’s office in London.
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In Ronan and Mescal’s favour was that they were of a similar emotional firepower and age — she is 29, he 27 — and they were both Irish. “The shared heritage was just brilliant,” Davis says. Please let them star together again.
One of the first things they did was work with an intimacy coach on the sex scenes, of which there are several. “That actually bonded them very, very quickly,” Davis says. “It was unbelievably natural. We were doing one rehearsal, an intimate scene, and then I just allowed it to flow into the scene afterwards where they’re talking in bed together, the way they had ended up after the rehearsal, entangled and easy with each other. I just felt the couple — we all felt it. We just fell into a bubble of intimacy. It didn’t feel like acting.”
Mescal had used an intimacy coach for his much-discussed sex scenes with Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People, while Ronan and Kate Winslet did without for theirs in Ammonite. Davis had never worked with one, although he had first-hand experience of chemistry between actors, having seen the sparks fly on Mary Magdalene between Rooney Mara as Mary and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus.
“I’m a very good matchmaker!” the director says. “Rooney and Joaquin felt very beautiful together — there was definitely some real chemistry.” So much so that they got together during the shoot and are now married with a child. There’s no suggestion of that this time — Ronan is in a relationship with the Scottish actor Jack Lowden — although Lowden may feel a twinge of jealousy at her rolling around so realistically with a vulnerable hunk like Mescal.
“Paul has the alpha aspect but he also has a really powerful sensitivity,” Davis says. “That’s very hard to find in men. There are moments of a young De Niro in this film.” It was Ronan, however, whom he cast first. “She’s the heart and soul of the movie. I was trying to find an actress that had a shining spirit and Saoirse has that.”
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Davis wrote the screenplay of Foe with Iain Reid, adapting Reid’s book of the same name. The Canadian’s novel had “great tension and suspense”, Davis says. “But usually those books end up somewhere predictable: a fight or a chase or a hostage situation or something stupid, whereas this turned a corner and went towards the relationship. I found that really refreshing.”
“I’m interested in writing about relationships because what’s more human?” Reid says, speaking separately. “The most common thing people do is partner up.” Getting together is the easy bit, though; what’s harder is to avoid taking each other for granted later on. That’s not going well for Hen and Junior, even before he has to leave.
“Hen woke up one day and realised she didn’t feel herself any more. She felt like someone else,” Davis says. Junior, of course, will soon literally be someone else, when his robo-usurper arrives. The film has a wrong-footing twist that makes you reconsider everything that came before — Davis hopes people will watch it more than once. “The first viewing is more intellectual, I guess, but the second is utterly emotional.”
This is the second adaptation of a Reid novel after I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which became a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, the twisted genius behind Being John Malkovich.
Both books and films focus on an isolated couple — in Foe they’re in a house; in I’m Thinking of Ending Things it’s a car. That comes, Reid says, from him growing up on a secluded farm in Ontario. “I brought friends from the city and in the morning they’re like, ‘I had a hard time sleeping — it was too quiet.’ ”
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During preproduction Davis asked Reid to take him to his family home and introduce him to local farmers. “The house in Foe is based on this old white farmhouse that we encountered on our drive one day,” Reid says. Although the film is vaguely set in America, “we don’t really want it to be easily placeable. It’s neat to think that it’s a Canadian farmhouse in Australia, with Irish and UK actors. People project where they want it to be.”
Neither of them had written a screenplay before, which Reid saw as an advantage. “I would never say: ‘Here’s the part where we should introduce rising action.’ I would tell it in a way that I would find intriguing, and a lot of that comes from Charlie.” When Kaufman adapted I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Reid “encouraged him to do whatever he wanted. Charlie is courageous and he would encourage people to want to be that way.”
• Foe review — Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan smoulder in a dystopia
There’s also a retro side to the film, whose science-fiction details — a futuristic car, a shot of Junior in space — are kept to a minimum. Junior is essentially being conscripted, which gives Foe the air of an intimate wartime romance; Davis says it reminds him of “Casablanca, Hitchcock, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Not everyone has warmed to the slow pace and theatre-style scenes — Davis refers sadly to “cruel critics”.
Yet Reid is pleased the film has chimed with Generation Z. “The way that we exist now is alienating and isolating,” he says. “We interact so much in a virtual space — that’s not what being a human is. I feel that particularly for young people, who are responding well to the movie.”
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Foe depicts a plausible future where “it’s all factory farming and cities are growing. Rural areas are going to be abandoned so that sense of isolation is going to be heightened.”
If you have to be cooped up with anyone for the end of the world, though, you could do a lot worse than Ronan and Mescal.
Foe is in cinemas
