Installation

• Director Garth Davis’ Foe, adapted from the novel by Iain Reid, is sci-fi for a future that has already happened.
• Junior, it transpires, has won a lottery that he wasn’t aware of entering and has been chosen for a two-year sojourn on The Installation.
• All the couple needs to do is make temporary room in their home for Terrance (Aaron Pierre), an OuterSense scientist.

Not quite human

• The techno-doppelgänger is a standard trope of sci-fi and one of its most successful in terms of posing questions about the human condition.
• Both, I think, were sci-fi cinema landmarks because they had scripts that offered acting talent the chance to play not-quite-humans while questioning what “human” means in the first place, but without costumes or CGI.
• Keeping the techno-wizardry to a minimum and presenting a recognisable world in a strange context allows audiences to gain a new perspective on their own realities.

Who’s the monster?

• It provides shelter from the extreme weather but is also where Hen and Junior are trapped as OuterSense asserts control over them.
• In this sense, Foe is, like much sci-fi, a sort-of retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein story, but with an evil corporation in the role of transgressing scientist.
• OuterSense is clearly representative of the kinds of transhumanist startups supported by tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel.
• Transhumanists believe that, with planet Earth doomed, our only recourse is to employ bioengineering to manufacture the next stage of evolution.