A Bold, Brutal Look at Belonging

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MOVIE REVIEW
Foreigner
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Genre: Horror, Coming-of-Age
Year Released: 2025
Runtime: 1h 29m
Director(s): Ava Maria Safai
Writer(s): Ava Maria Safai
Cast: Rose Dehgan, Chloë MacLeod, Maryam Sadeghi, Ashkan Nejati, Talisa Mae Stewart, Victoria Wardell
Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival

RAVING REVIEW: The pressures of assimilation, especially for immigrant teens, are rarely presented with a story this powerful. FOREIGNER captures a time when low-rise jeans and sitcom reruns ruled pop culture, but reimagines that familiar coming-of-age formula through a supernatural horror lens. Ava Maria Safai’s directorial debut dares to blend pastel-filtered aesthetics with the creeping dread of cultural erasure, delivering a film that’s equal parts satire and psychological nightmare. It does all of this with very little “traditional horror” and with a focus on fear, anger, and judgment.

Set in early 2000s Canada, FOREIGNER follows Yasamin—played with intensity by newcomer Rose Dehgan—as she struggles to acclimate to her new life after immigrating with her family from Iran. The discomfort of trying to “pass” as Canadian is immediately palpable, especially once she’s absorbed into a trio of overly curious, “casually racist” mean girls who treat her like a curiosity rather than a peer. It’s not long before her desire to fit in spirals into a decision to dye her hair blonde—a symbol of Western beauty, conformity, and her desperate reach for acceptance. But that transformation invites more than tension. It awakens something ancient and dangerous.

The horror in FOREIGNER isn’t driven by blood or brutality—it’s psychological, symbolic, and fueled by the trauma of erasure. Yasamin’s changing identity is mirrored by a dark force that begins to consume her, pulling her further from her family and her roots. Her rejection of Iranian culture isn’t just metaphorical—it’s supernatural. The deeper she sinks into assimilation, the more the spirit she unleashes tightens its grip.

Safai, a Canadian-Iranian artist, constructs the world of the film with an insider’s understanding of cultural tension. While the script explores familiar high school dynamics, it’s the immigrant lens that lends new weight. Themes of inherited trauma, intergenerational disconnect, and racialized othering are treated with nuance, never interrupting the genre thrills but instead deepening them.

Visually, FOREIGNER leans hard into the era it depicts. Costume designer Kristi McQuade and production designer Hannah Grace Nicholls give us a glossy, bubblegum-toned dreamscape where Y2K nostalgia oozes off the screen. But the contrast between that aesthetic and the story’s slow-building dread makes it all the more unsettling. The vibrant colors begin to feel like camouflage for something simmering underneath.

Chloë MacLeod steals scenes as Rachel, the queen bee who uses curiosity as a weapon. She’s bubbly and bright with an unsettling edge, the kind of teen movie antagonist that could’ve stepped out of a Lindsay Lohan-era comedy—if that character were also a vessel for colonial entitlement. Her performance balances menace and charisma, making it all too easy to see why Yasi is drawn in. But it’s Rose Dehgan who anchors the film. She doesn’t overplay Yasi’s upheaval, instead letting it simmer just under the surface. There’s a quiet devastation in her performance that builds until the film’s final act, when everything boils over.

While FOREIGNER toys with genre conventions—touching on body horror, possession, and psychological thriller—it doesn’t feel derivative. Instead, Safai mixes recognizable elements into something fresh. Comparisons to MEAN GIRLS and HEATHERS are appropriate on the surface, but this film digs deeper into the wounds left by cultural displacement. The horror doesn’t come from ghosts or demons alone—it’s the fear of being unseen in a place that demands you erase yourself to belong.

The film’s most climactic moments are sharp. Although some moments might have benefited from more time to develop—particularly the tension between Yasamin and her grandmother—there’s no mistaking the power of the final act. It’s a rebuke of whiteness as the default, but also a tender cry for connection, identity, and a sense of home. FOREIGNER lays the groundwork for Ava Maria Safai as a new force in genre cinema. Her script doesn’t spoon-feed meaning or lean too hard on allegory. Instead, she trusts the audience to sit with the discomfort of watching someone tear themselves apart to survive.

What could’ve been just a clever twist on high school horror becomes something far deeper. The film isn’t just about a teen girl trying to be popular—it’s about what it costs to shrink yourself until you disappear. Safai’s background as a songwriter and performer is evident in the fluidity of her storytelling and the emotional depth of her characters. This is horror that moves with purpose. There will be those who see FOREIGNER as an allegory. Others might focus on its genre innovations. But its lasting impression is emotional: a story about the pain of invisibility, and the monstrous things that bloom in its shadow.

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[photo courtesy of SAFFRON BLONDE PRODUCTIONS, THE HARLEQUIN THEATRE SOCIETY, NALTOBEL PRODUCTIONS, RAVEN BANNER ENTERTAINMENT]

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