Fantasia Festival 2025: ‘Foreigner,’ a bizarre, timely slice of disturbia

Ava Maria Safai’s Foreigner, playing this year’s Fantasia Festival, could not be more timely. This moment in time is corkscrewed with blatant racism, micro-aggressions, and the idea that immigrants are less than. Safai takes great care in exploring Iranian culture and how one young teen assimilates to whiteness when her father and grandmother move her to Canada. Real-life horrors lie at the heart of this bizarre piece of disturbia that takes cues from Mean Girls and Heathers. Safai doesn’t skirt around the issues that still plague modern society; she instead leans into them and offers a startling tale of fitting in and losing oneself to societal pressures.

Yasmin (Rose Deghan), or Yasi to her friends, spends her days preparing for her first day of school in Canada by watching her favorite TV show, Friends. She mimics the dialogue, replaying the same scene over and over again, until she can perfect the accent. Her fears of being rejected percolate on the surface. She also obsesses over a teen-focused magazine that spouts Aryan propaganda and convinces her that changing her appearance (dyeing her hair blonde) promises to unlock untapped social potential.

On her first day of school, Yasmin befriends “Queen Bee” Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and her loyal plastics Emily (Victoria Wadell) and Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart). They’re seemingly ripped from The Stepford Wives or Uncanny Valley with their skin-deep eeriness and unwavering commitment to being socially perfect and perfectly white. They bathe Yasmin in compliments, coated in subtle racism, and pull her into their glossy, magazine-ready pack. As time goes on, Yasmin abandons her culture to become as white as her new friends. She dyes her hair a striking blonde and begins exhibiting a strangeness that overtakes her body. Safai’s work testifies to the ongoing scourge that is whiteness and the angry desire to make the other more like them. A potent script does half the work, with Deghan delivering a mesmerizing and heartbreaking performance.

Foreigner captures the brutal reality that many people of color face on a daily basis. Yasmin agonizes over her desperation to fit in, peeling back the layers of herself until a hollow shell remains. Safai makes a film so razor-sharp that it’d be hard to ignore its powerful messaging. It might even draw blood. Methodical and slick, the cinematography underscores the thematic intent through various camera angles, color palettes, and considerable visual tension.

Among the best Fantasia Festival has to offer, Foreigner wakes you up and makes you pay attention. It’s a shot of adrenaline to the shoulder and courses through the veins at an alarming rate. In 2025, sometimes you need films that hit you over the head to transmit their ideas that all white people need to understand. From time to time, a film like Foreigner comes along that shakes up the status quo and dares to dismantle the patriarchal establishment.