Foe 4K 2023 2160p WEB-DL

The near future. A couple lives on a remote farm and tries to survive in a world of incessant climate change. Suddenly, the husband is hired by a mysterious corporation to work in space.

Foe 4K Review
The post-apocalyptic future is not far away. The Earth is on the verge of ecological disaster: global warming has caused an eternal drought on the planet, most of the vital resources have disappeared forever. Thanks to a sharp jump in technological progress, mankind has begun to colonize other habitable space objects. The main characters, married couple Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal), live on a remote farm in the middle of a wasteland where wheat fields once stretched. One day, Terrence (Aaron Pierre), a representative of a government corporation that is recruiting people to board a new space satellite dedicated to human resettlement, comes to their home. He offers Junior a one-year contract that will provide his family with a trouble-free existence. Henrietta, on the other hand, gets a temporary replacement for her husband in the person of an android with his appearance and memories.

The sci-fi release from director Garth Davis, author of the Oscar-winning biographical drama "Lion" with Dev Patel, at first looked like the perfect lead-in to another Oscar, if not in the acting category, then at least in the screenplay category. "Enemy" is based on Ian Reed's 2018 work of the same name. The book has received many literary honors in its time, most notably winning the prestigious Bram Stoker Award.

Reed's previous screen adaptation, the epistolary novel I Thinking of Ending Things, directed by Hollywood wunderkind Charlie Kaufman ("Adaptation"), was very warmly received by the press, but made a modest claim in awards season. It's important to realize that Ian Reed's language is artistically parsimonious and difficult to construct visual metaphors. That said, both of his works have a rather heavy-handed intellectual background that is never directly expressed. Kaufman has substantially reworked Reed, adding animation and even a music scene to the movie to at least compensate for the understatement. Garth Davis, a much more artless director, decided to shoot "The Enemy" as close to the text as possible, without trying to delve into some of the deeper meanings laid down by the writer. As a result, the movie turned out to be extremely poor in emotions and dialogues - most of the time the characters Ronan and Mescala do not express exactly nothing, which is quite destructive for the acting potential of both. The first half of "The Enemy" looks like a protracted adaptation of an average family crisis, the main essence of which is presented only in half hints: Junior behaves strangely and unpredictably, Henrietta closes herself in the basement and plays the piano, winks mysteriously with Terrence, cries into a pillow. Quite quickly it becomes clear that the audience is being prepared for a bursting catharsis, a so-called Shyamalan plod-twist, which will make you reconsider all the events from a new angle.

But for some reason it is in the climax that Garth Davis suddenly remembers that he is filming not only a dystopia, but also a melodrama, furiously unravels the emotional tangle, eventually goes into blatant manipulation and makes everyone around him feel guilty. In Reed's original novel, figuring out who's really the enemy of whom isn't easy; in the film adaptation, Davis puts the full weight of responsibility on Junior's shoulders, making him look like either a domestic tyrant or a down-and-out ignoramus. It's funny that the fem-contexts that popped up by the finale of "Enemy" were never mentioned in the book and seem superfluous, primarily because they shift the focus of attention from the main problem of the film - the exploitation of artificial intelligence. One gets the impression that Davis simply walked away from the risky topic in advance - it will not be possible to make a second "Artificial Intelligence" anyway, he plays much better on the field of romanticizing human suffering.

And yet the rating of 23% on the aggregator Rotten Tomatoes even for "Enemy" seems to be an excessively strict punishment from critics - the film at least fascinates with poetic shots of post-apocalyptic ordinariness. However, even this victory is hard to credit to Davis, as the visual beauty of the movie is not his, but Hungarian cameraman Matyas Erdely, who proved his unwavering talent in the Oscar-winning drama "Son of Saul".