Foreigner

Yasamin’s mother has been dead for some time now, but the shy Iranian teenager distinctly remembers her saying “One day we’ll go to Canada and it will all be better.”

Now living in their new Canadian home with her father and grandmother, and about to start at her new high school, Yasi (Rose Dehgan) worries about fitting in. She’s made a huge effort with her English, mostly by watching TV, and has tried hard to conform to the images she sees in adverts. ‘Feel possessed. Blonde!’ says one, in a magazine.

At school, she escapes the ignominy of being alone when she’s adopted by a trio of popular girls: blonde Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and brunette clones Emily (Victoria Wardell) and Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart). Rachel likes to talk about Bible camp and they have a fine line in sinister, overwrought smiles. They have their own ways of dressing and talking which Yasi does her best to imitate, and they make videos togeher, doing dance routines. The girls seem well intentioned, frequenty calling one another out for the sin of assuming, but questions like “Where are you really from?” betray an ingrained culture of racism. Yasi doesn’t want them to think of her that way anymore. She doesn’t want to be an outsider. Salvation comes from the supermarket, in the form of a product called Die Blonde. At least, it seems like salvation at the time.

Getting one’s bearings in a new country is never easy. When her grandmother sees those golden locks, a shadow passes over her face, and it’s clear that she’s afraid for the girl. is it simply that she’s older, wiser, more alert to the dangers inherent in losing one’s own identity? Is she alert to the particular associations of north American femininity, and blondness, with victimhood? Or is it about what happened to Yasi’s mother, who was obsessed with Western soap operas and magazines, and something that pursued her through them?

Making conscious changes to the body is one thing. When they start to happen spontaneously, that’s something else. Yasi sees something in a photograph of herself that scares her. Then there are the possible hallucinations, possible body horror experiences involving her arms, which may scare viewers. Of course, whilst she’s going through this, she’s in the late stages of adolescence. One wouldn’t expect that to manifest in quite this way, but it may well be adding to her sense of alienation from herself.

Screened as part of Fantasia 2025, this is full of beautifully observed moments. Yasi’s father and grandmother are also adjusting to Canadian culture, but still she’s shocked when she gets grounded. The tantrum with which she eventually confronts them is pure Western teenage entitlement. The relationships between the girls are adeptly depicted, and the girls’ values are shown respect even when they might seem absurd from an adult standpoint. After all, they too have a culture of their own. That said, the degree to which they function as acolytes of capitalism is chilling in an uncanny valley way – at times they don’t seem quite human.

An astute portrait of an experience still underexplored onscreen, and making good use of genre trappings to address it, Foreigner is an impressive piece of work from a young director who clearly has a lot more to say.

Reviewed on: 03 Aug 2025