Imagine a stranger shows up at your door and tells you, "I need to have an intimate understanding of your marriage — the good and the bad."
So begins Foe, which sees the lives of Hen and Junior (Oscar nominees Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal) interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious man named Terrance (Aaron Pierre). The year is 2065, and Terrance tells Junior that he has been selected to leave their farm behind to live on a space station. In his absence, the government will provide someone to watch over Hen. (In the trailer, Mescal's Junior refers to said someone as "a robot.")
Ronan is a four-time Oscar nominee — for Atonement (2007), Brooklyn (2015), Lady Bird (2017), and Little Women (2019) — while fellow Irish actor Mescal earned his first Oscar nomination this year for Aftersun. Foe was directed by Garth Davis, whose directorial debut was 2016's Oscar-nominated Lion, and based on the novel by Iain Reid, who co-wrote the screenplay with Davis. (It is Reid's second novel to be adapted to the screen, following Charlie Kaufman's 2020 adaptation of I'm Thinking of Ending Things.)
"What I find really powerful about the movie is it asks us to be awake and to be alive," Davis told Vanity Fair. "A lot of the problems we face in relationships and with the environment and with all sorts of things coming our way is that we’re asleep at the wheel. This movie is really saying, 'Wake up. Your life is precious, and if you take it for granted, you’re going to lose it."
Foe opens in theaters on Oct. 6, following its debut at the New York Film Festival. Watch the trailer below.
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