FrightFest review – Foreigner
Some time in the oughts, Yasamin Karimi (Rose Dehgan) emigrates from Iran with her father Ali (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother Zoreh (Maryam Sadeghi) to settle in Canada … where she is torn between an urge to assimilate into a world she has envisioned through watching ‘sit-coms in English’ and her family’s insistence on speaking Farsi at home and only listening to Iranian pop music. At school, she falls in with a very odd three-girl clique – Rachel (Chloe MacLeod), Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart) and Emily (Victoria Wardell) – who are more like smiling demon harpies (they profess to be Christian) than mean girls, and are utterly clueless about their passive-aggressive racism (‘you look Spanish’).
Writer-director Ava Maria Safai based a lot of this on her own teenage experience and Dehgan’s Yasamin is interestingly not guiltless – okay, her friends don’t know that Iran and Persia are the same place but her idea about Canada is entirely formed by teen magazines, sit-coms and (presumably) films like Mean Girls. When she turns her hair blonde using a product whose creepy slogan is ‘Die Blonde’, Yasamin might also become possessed by a spirit called a zar – which leads to mood swings, paranormal abilities (including levitation) and some extreme bad hair days.
The spook aspects of the film are a little undeveloped, though there is now an interesting clump of films (Sister Midnight, Tiger Claws, It Lives Inside) about women from non-western cultures being drawn to or transformed by their own dark magic. It possibly works better as a teen pic – the clique girls’ fixed smiles and wide eyes are a scarier look than anything the possessed protagonist manages.
Here’s the FrightFest listing.
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