Foreigner (2025) starts with an advertisement: if this seems trivial, be forewarned, it’s actually surprisingly central to the plot, this product called Die [sic] Blonde – a box dye, seemingly particularly popular with teens…
We don’t stick around here, though. We next meet a little girl and her mother, dreaming of a better life in Canada. Mom expresses to little Yasamin (in Farsi) that learning English will be vital to fitting in when they get there, though getting her to learn the word ‘foreigner’ off by heart isn’t how they do it on Duolingo. In any case, it seems to be a lesson Yasi (Rose Dehgan) takes to heart, though by the next time we see her, she’s a teenager – studying trashy TV sitcoms to best pick up the true intonations of Canadian English. She, her father and her grandmother – no mom, for reasons later explored – have recently relocated to Canada from Iran. Yasi is about to start school, and like any girl her age, she’s really worried about fitting in. As well she might be: the school is framed as a Gothic fortress at first, and as we continuously view Yasi from the back as she faces firstly her new school and then her new peers, it very much feels like Yasi vs. the rest.
There are some friendly-ish overtures made, though: Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and twins, or what seem to be twins, Kristen and Emily (Talisa Mae Stewart, Victoria Wardell) take Yasi under their wing, though this largely seems to mean saying or asking stupid things about her cultural background. Yasi is flattered, but even more anxious now that she’s part of the cool girls’ social circle, so she’s keen to get it right. She begins to settle, though it won’t escape the audience that one of the things Rachel suggests may help Yasi to really fit in would be to change her hair colour to…blonde. Interesting, given none of Yasi’s friends are blonde, but it’s an idea which hangs around until Yasi can withstand the lure of the box dye no longer. Foreigner relies heavily on the symbolism of blonde hair as the epitome of vanity, shallowness and disguise. It’s a proxy for invasive white culture here, too. Her friends love her new look, but the losing struggle to fit in continues, and if anything becomes far more challenging, with strange dreams and visions competing with the daily gamut of culture clashes and culture shocks.
Foreigner is a candy-coloured social satire in some respects, though it moves more into horror territory as the runtime moves along. It’s rather daring to try to take the film in this direction, and it reads like a ‘what if?’ extended to a few notable horror-adjacent films, particularly Heathers (lots of the aesthetics resemble Heathers very strongly, too). However, there are a couple of issues with this approach. Firstly, Foreigner is all about the shallow perceptions and misunderstandings which people often retain about others, particularly people outside of their own cultural milieu. This works both ways, though, with Yasi’s family seemingly resistant to the country which has offered them a new life. Their notions of superiority towards their new home feel a touch hard to understand in places, as well as somewhat overblown in others. I know it’s not a documentary (though director Ava Maria Safai has partly based her film on her own experiences as an immigrant growing up in Canada) but it makes Rachel and the twins’ ignorance about Iran and Iranian culture feel less clearly delineated as straightforwardly bad, and more like a similar version of the same behaviour coming from Yasi’s home. Which would be fine – perhaps no one really comes off that well here – but the film’s shift into horror really relies on clear ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
If this wasn’t enough, it then moves into being bad on a new, supernatural level, which sees a hair colour doing some unprecedented heavy lifting as a plot point. Finding out more about what this could all mean – how the vanity element corresponds to the supernatural – is reserved for the last third of the film, though, so the film spends quite a lot of its time showing us simply that, before we are offered different reasons for her post-peroxide behaviour, Yasi is a different person, and not for the better. (Dare I say it all feels quite reactionary/conservative in tone? Is that permitted?)
Well, Foreigner definitely does need something else up its sleeve than just a malignant friend group, and it does strive to make a later connection to horror, though the shift into its horror content feels a little abrupt, too. Sure, there are hints along the way (Smile has really done a number on smiling) but even in a comparatively short film, Foreigner does feel like it’s spreading its narrative elements quite thinly, with just a quick dab of Persian folklore thrown into the mix in ways which only serve to showcase the film’s low budget for SFX.
Perhaps a victim of its own (still wholly admirable) ambition in key respects, then, Foreigner is still an enjoyable genre-splice of a film, well made on a technical level with good aesthetics and engaging performances, particularly from the girls themselves. Fans of bubblegum horror may find enough to respect and commend here, even if some audiences might want more complex social commentary, some more overt humour, and others might want more heft behind the eventual horror.
Foreigner (2025) featured on 31st July at the Fantasia Film Festival.