{"id":9439,"date":"2025-07-23T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=9439"},"modified":"2025-07-23T12:35:32","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T17:35:32","slug":"a-bold-brutal-look-at-belonging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/a-bold-brutal-look-at-belonging\/","title":{"rendered":"A Bold, Brutal Look at Belonging"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>5 Minute, 12 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEW
\nForeigner<\/strong>
\n\u00a0–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Horror, Coming-of-Age
\nYear Released: <\/strong>2025
\nRuntime:<\/strong> 1h 29m
\nDirector(s): <\/strong>Ava Maria Safai
\nWriter(s): <\/strong>Ava Maria Safai
\nCast: <\/strong>Rose Dehgan, Chlo\u00eb MacLeod, Maryam Sadeghi, Ashkan Nejati, Talisa Mae Stewart, Victoria Wardell
\nWhere to Watch: <\/strong>shown at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival<\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>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\u2019s directorial debut dares to blend pastel-filtered aesthetics with the creeping dread of cultural erasure, delivering a film that\u2019s equal parts satire and psychological nightmare. It does all of this with very little \u201ctraditional horror\u201d and with a focus on fear, anger, and judgment.<\/p>\n

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Set in early 2000s Canada, FOREIGNER follows Yasamin\u2014played with intensity by newcomer Rose Dehgan\u2014as she struggles to acclimate to her new life after immigrating with her family from Iran. The discomfort of trying to \u201cpass\u201d as Canadian is immediately palpable, especially once she\u2019s absorbed into a trio of overly curious, \u201ccasually racist\u201d mean girls who treat her like a curiosity rather than a peer. It\u2019s not long before her desire to fit in spirals into a decision to dye her hair blonde\u2014a symbol of Western beauty, conformity, and her desperate reach for acceptance. But that transformation invites more than tension. It awakens something ancient and dangerous.<\/p>\n

The horror in FOREIGNER isn\u2019t driven by blood or brutality\u2014it\u2019s psychological, symbolic, and fueled by the trauma of erasure. Yasamin\u2019s 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\u2019t just metaphorical\u2014it\u2019s supernatural. The deeper she sinks into assimilation, the more the spirit she unleashes tightens its grip.<\/p>\n

Safai, a Canadian-Iranian artist, constructs the world of the film with an insider\u2019s understanding of cultural tension. While the script explores familiar high school dynamics, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s slow-building dread makes it all the more unsettling. The vibrant colors begin to feel like camouflage for something simmering underneath.<\/p>\n

Chlo\u00eb MacLeod steals scenes as Rachel, the queen bee who uses curiosity as a weapon. She\u2019s bubbly and bright with an unsettling edge, the kind of teen movie antagonist that could\u2019ve stepped out of a Lindsay Lohan-era comedy\u2014if 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\u2019s Rose Dehgan who anchors the film. She doesn\u2019t overplay Yasi\u2019s upheaval, instead letting it simmer just under the surface. There\u2019s a quiet devastation in her performance that builds until the film\u2019s final act, when everything boils over.<\/p>\n

While FOREIGNER toys with genre conventions\u2014touching on body horror, possession, and psychological thriller\u2014it doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t come from ghosts or demons alone\u2014it\u2019s the fear of being unseen in a place that demands you erase yourself to belong.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s most climactic moments are sharp. Although some moments might have benefited from more time to develop\u2014particularly the tension between Yasamin and her grandmother\u2014there\u2019s no mistaking the power of the final act. It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

What could\u2019ve been just a clever twist on high school horror becomes something far deeper. The film isn\u2019t just about a teen girl trying to be popular\u2014it\u2019s about what it costs to shrink yourself until you disappear. Safai\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of SAFFRON BLONDE PRODUCTIONS, THE HARLEQUIN THEATRE SOCIETY, NALTOBEL PRODUCTIONS, RAVEN BANNER ENTERTAINMENT]<\/em><\/p>\n

DISCLAIMER:<\/strong>
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MOVIE REVIEW Foreigner \u00a0–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Genre: Horror, Coming-of-Age Year Released: 2025 Runtime: 1h 29m Director(s): Ava Maria Safai Writer(s): Ava Maria Safai Cast: Rose Dehgan, Chlo\u00eb MacLeod, Maryam Sadeghi, Ashkan Nejati, Talisa Mae Stewart, Victoria Wardell Where to Watch: shown at the 2025 Fantasia Film Festival RAVING REVIEW:\u00a0The pressures of assimilation, especially for immigrant teens, are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9440,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fantasia","category-film-festival"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9439"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9459,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9439\/revisions\/9459"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}