For all her excellent, wide-ranging roles, Saoirse Ronan has not yet been to space. And alas, though she’s set to star in writer-director Garth Davis’s adaptation of Iain Reid’s near future SF novel Foe, she’s still not going to space. That honor goes to Paul Mescal (Normal People), who will play Junior, a man randomly chosen to visit an experimental space station. But his wife, Hen (Ronan), won’t exactly be left alone at home.
Deadline’s piece about the film and the book’s cover copy are both teasingly vague, but it sounds like there’s either a clone or a robot involved.
LaKeith Stanfield (Sorry to Bother You) will play Terrance, who brings the space invitation to Hen and Junior’s door. The film is described as “a taut, sensual, psychological mind-bender set in the near future where corporate power and environmental decay are ravaging the planet,” which frankly just sounds like the present, not the future, but the whole experimental space station bit is maybe still a little ways off.
Here’s the book’s description:
In Iain Reid’s second haunting, philosophical puzzle of a novel, set in the near-future, Junior and Henrietta live a comfortable, solitary life on their farm, far from the city lights, but in close quarters with each other. One day, a stranger from the city arrives with alarming news: Junior has been randomly selected to travel far away from the farm…very far away. The most unusual part? Arrangements have already been made so that when he leaves, Henrietta won’t have a chance to miss him, because she won’t be left alone—not even for a moment. Henrietta will have company. Familiar company.
Davis’s debut feature film was 2016’s Oscar-nominated Lion, which was also adapted from a book. He also directed 2018’s Mary Magdalene, and as of last year was attached to direct Tron 3, whenever that happens.
Foe is set to begin filming in Australia in January.
I can’t actually remember if it was a clone or a robot, but I do remember I detested this book. It’s that thing when “literary” writers slum in science fiction and figure they’ve invented tropes that everyone else has been playing with for about the last fifty years. The revelation was so obvious that I had talked myself out of it and then back into it about five times before it happened. This book’s absolute refusal to have any fresh ideas and even more obstinate refusal to connect with the tradition in which the writer was bumbling about like a child in a busy, thriving salon (the idea kind, not the beauty kind) was infuriating.
It’s the kind of thing your non-SF friends recommend to you because “you like that kind of stuff.” They say, “It’s like science fiction, but it’s better written and has real characters and stuff.” (Spoiler: it isn’t and it doesn’t.)
I guess maybe I won’t watch the movie.