Fresh off the Cannes Virtual Market, Amazon Studios is in talks to acquire Garth Davis’s sci-fi thriller Foe. Adapted from Iain Reid’s bestselling novel of the same name with a script by Davis and Reid, it was also announced that Saoirse Ronan (Little Women), Paul Mescal (Normal People), and LaKeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You) will star in the film, with a script from Davis and Reid, and with Davis at the helm.
The second novel from Reid, Foe — published in 2018 — tells the story of a married couple living a peaceful life on a remote farm in the near future, before their lives are thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a stranger. Ronan and Mescal are set to play the young couple, Junior and Hen, while Stanfield will play Terrance, the man who shows up at their door claiming Junior has been selected to travel to a large, experimental space station orbiting Earth. Tensions rise as Terrance explains that arrangements have already been made, and that Hen will be “well cared for” in his absence.
“The point of the movie is that corporate power and environmental decay is literally eating away at the natural world,” Davis said to Deadline, “Not just the environment but from a human point of view, it’s eating away at society and taking away why we’re meant to be here and what connects us.”
Foe is Reid’s second novel to be turned into a film project, after Netflix’s 2020 adaptation of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, starring Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons. According to Davis, he’d been “on the hunt to do something in sci-fi”, as well as looking to find material he could “make an actor’s piece with a Cassavetes-ian level of performance”. The film has been described as a “taut, sensual, psychological mind-bender”, promising just as much of a gut punch as Reid’s previous work. Foe, like Davis’s 2016’s venture, Lion, will feature a tech element that incorporates heavily into the story.
Filming is set to begin in January in Australia, with FilmNation currently brokering international rights to the project alongside Amazon.