By David Dent
Don’t look at Foreigner director Ava Maria Safai’s website if you don’t want to feel like a real slouch. At 26 Canadian Safai, whose parents are Iranian, already has an extensive acting/choreography/music CV showing that she can turn her hand to pretty much anything; she’s taken a similar approach with her second feature, which puts loads of different genres into the cinematic blender.
Young Yasamin (Rose Dehgan) has been relocated from Iran to Canada after the loss of her mother, together with her father Ali (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother Zoreh (Maryam Sadeghi). The girl has had to learn English pretty quickly, finessing her new language via TV ads and shows.
At her new school Yasmin is a fish out of water and is almost immediately adopted by a trio of identikit girl students who give “the plastics” from 2004’s Mean Girls a run for the money. Leader Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and her acolytes Emily (Victoria Wardell) and Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart) take Yasmin under their wing, encouraging her to embrace Canadian teen culture, much to the increasing horror of dad and grandma. Yasi’s increasing surliness could just be attributed to adolescent hormones and the pain of fitting in. But Zoreh feels that her granddaughter’s behaviour, culminating in her dyeing her dark hair blonde to fit in with her new friends (and because, as the ads suggest, ‘blondes have more fun’), may have a more demonic explanation.
Foreigner may turn horrific in its last third, but Safai is clearly not keen to make a run of the mill fright flick. Instead she balances the tropes of teen comedy – and Foreigner is at times very funny, if awkwardly so – with the tension of culture clash Canada, and its attendant institutional racism.
It will perhaps surprise few viewers that the story of Foreigner (apparently written by the director, who also produced and edited it, in a day) is ‘from the life’; Safai experienced many of the challenges of growing up in public within Canadian culture but being immersed in Persian culture when she got home. The movie is set in the Noughties, equivalent to the decade in which Safai came of age, and its climate of crude laptop filmed girl dances, cheesy TV shows and squeaky-clean teen mags is spot on.
Foreigner is a bit all over the place and perhaps unsure where to land, but Safai directs well and with a great feeling for her subject matter. To be honest the horror elements are perhaps the least effective parts of the movie, but I salute her mashup intentions, and the movie wisely doesn’t outstay its 80 minute welcome.
Foreigner screened as part of Frightfest 2025.
Bloody Flicks 