‘Foe’ Review: Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal Star in a Muddled Dystopian Replicant Love Triangle

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Foe” is a grandly muddled dystopian sci-fi movie starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal as a Midwestern farm couple in 2065 (they appear to be the only Midwestern farm couple left).

When you hear the film’s premise, which makes it sound like a cross between “Interstellar” and “Blade Runner,” you may think it’s going to be one of those movies in which a pair of critical darlings from the indie world leave their low-budget poetic movies behind to plug themselves into the blockbuster machine.

But “Foe” isn’t a visual-effects-laden, box-office-fixated lollapalooza. The movie, the bulk of which takes place in the couple’s 200-year-old farmhouse, is small-scale and intimate, and it’s been designed to milk Ronan and Mescal for every inch of their raw actorly integrity.

It opens with Ronan standing in the shower, weeping. We hear her character, Hen (short for Henrietta), in voice-over, thinking back over her marriage and invoking a heavy but familiar idea: that a relationship will start off suffused with romantic idealism, but over time the magic wears away, and you’re left with something cold and stolid and uninspiring, to the point that Hen says that pieces of herself have fallen away.