Foe review: Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan bring sultriness to their on-screen marriage but it’s spoiled by earnestness

"I don't want a robot living with my wife," protests Paul Mescal's beleaguered grunt in Foe, banging his fist on a table with all the conviction of a sketch comedy performer trying to keep from cracking up in front of a live studio audience. Mescal and fellow compatriot Saoirse Ronan play an unlikely Mid-Western American couple in 2065, where — as a title card all but copied-and-pasted from Blade Runner informs us — climate change has rendered the planet uninhabitable, the population is moving to off-world space stations, and "simulants" have been created as substitutes to humans. Winton Wetlands becomes film set Photo shows man with curly hair, wearing a face mask, standing beside filming equipped with dead gums in the backdrop There are hopes the cinema release of Foe will increase the profile of Victoria's Winton Wetlands. Once Terrance reveals the overarching plan, however — that the off-world corporation will replace Junior with his synthetic clone to keep Hen company while he's away — the movie takes a dramatic turn for the accidentally comedic, lapsing into increasingly cornball dialogue and trite visual motifs. The film's overheated dramatic climax is — albeit unintentionally — one for the ages, a perfect storm of great ideas run aground on terrible execution: gruesomely sincere performances, laugh-out-loud lines and a maudlin violin score wailing away at every turn.