...but not even he could make Foe worth watching.
Since Normal People hit the small screen in 2020, the Irish actor has enjoyed a rise to fame like few before. Still, his breakthrough performance as Connell Waldron could have been a one-hit wonder with its staggering vulnerability never to be repeated. Thankfully, that wasn't to be. Though his big-screen debut, The Lost Daughter, didn't ask much from the Maynooth-born hunk with perpetually sad eyes, the 2022 double feature of Aftersun and God's Creatures revealed surprising range. So much so that he secured his first Oscar nomination for the Charlotte Wells stunner, a rare honor for its kind of understated work.
Garth Davis' Foe is the first significant stumble in a mostly impeccable resume. Still, that need not be the end-all-be-all of Mescal's 2023…
For Paul Mescal, the year started with the release of Carmen, the Benjamin Millepied dance-heavy twist on Bizet's opera. The picture takes the classic story from 19th century Seville to the present-day Mexico-US border, re-imagining it to the point where the original material is but an abstraction. Dramaturgically, it's got flaws aplenty, only coming alive when narrative lays dormant, and choreography rises to the forefront. This means the cast is limited in what they can do, often stumbling through the straight drama in wait for a dance break, a song, or a chance to breathe.
And when they get the chance, the pair is close to incandescent. Like his leading lady Melissa Barrera, Mescal delivers the musical parts with enough conviction to make you forget what's not working in Millepied's vision. It's also enough for one to ignore how odd an American accent sounds in that Irish mouth, unnatural and dripping with exhaustion, the evident effort of a performer straining themselves to meet a challenge that might be beyond them. That problem is further intensified in Foe, a mess of geographical displacement on all fronts.
Supposedly set in a dried-up Midwest, sometime in the near future when the climate crisis has ravaged the Earth, leaving it an arid husk where growing life is near impossible. That said, the landscape chosen is the Australian outback, and the actors inhabiting the place are maybe the most famous Irish actors of their generation. Both Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal try to breathe life into their farmer roles, plundering away at their internal despair, the discontentment that defines a life of nothingness, forgotten people in a forgotten land.
Their physical work has merit, sex scenes and nudity making for a strange strike at eros within a tale allergic to true thirst, almost as if the characters were playacting a sentimental breath they don't possess. But then comes the dialogue, and it's all for naught. Neither Ronan nor Mescal can make sense of it, falling into the drudgery without putting too much of a fight. And yet, even then, she acquits herself better than him, unencumbered by playing a man looking for an escape and his robotic double, too, left at home to comfort an abandoned wife.
When the twist comes, so does Foe come undone, and Mescal collapses under the weight of too many underdeveloped ideas over too frail a foundation. It's a sad state of affairs, only watchable because of the performer's innate charisma, his beauty before the camera, and the audience's lustful gaze. Luckily for him, this isn't Paul Mescal's last 2023 release, so there's still a chance he'll leave the year on another career high. After the stodgy sci-fi, a fantastic ghost story awaits. It's Andrew Haigh's new film and one of the season's most acclaimed titles – All of Us Strangers.
Playing the neighbor paramour to Andrew Scott's lonesome character, Mescal takes on a supporting role before a couple more leading parts in the immediate future. He'll be the Sword and Sandal star of Ridley Scott's Gladiator sequel, the co-protagonist of Oliver Hermanus' The History of Sound alongside Josh O'Connor, William Shakespeare in Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, Margaret Qualley's husband in Deniz Gamze Ergüven's The End of Things, and Franklin Shepard in Richard Linklater's epic adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along by Sondheim. In other words, get ready to see a lot of Mescal in the coming years, and let's hope the films are more All of Us Strangers and less like Foe.
Carmen and Foe are currently streaming on most major platforms, available to rent and purchase. Andrew Haigh's latest opens December 22nd, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics.