Science fiction is never really about the future. The best sci-fi makes use of an imagined future world to provide a critical distance from our current time; to ask questions about what we are doing rather than where we are going.
Director Garth Davis’ Foe, adapted from the novel by Iain Reid, is sci-fi for a future that has already happened. Filmed in Australia, where the existing landscape does a good job of standing in for the aftermath of the climate apocalypse, Foe is a forceful meditation on relationships, technological determinism and the power of advanced capitalism to, literally, construct identities.
Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) live in isolation in the American midwest. The year is 2065 and a powerful tech corporation called OuterSense is spearheading migration to The Installation, an orbiting artificial world designed as refuge from a dying planet Earth.
