The Cinematheque

“Economical, elliptical, and altogether haunting … A film that knows what it’s doing—and surprises us at those moments when it reveals its larger design.”

Jonathan Romney, Screen International

The debut feature of Edmonton-born writer-director Graham Foy is something special. A free-floating portrait of adolescent malaise in the suburbs of Alberta, it renders the pangs of teenhood into worlds nebulous and strange—worlds truer to the lived emotions of youth. The film’s dreamlike narrative opens with two inseparable skateboarders (Jackson Sluiter and Marcel T. Jiménez), whose languid Prairie summer is curtailed by sudden tragedy. In the fog of trauma that follows, the diary of a missing girl (Hayley Ness) is discovered and the movie’s structural slippage begins. The Maiden is the latest auteur-driven film from Canadian indie outfit MDFF (subject of a Cinematheque retrospective in 2021). Absorbing the grammar of ​“death trilogy”-era Van Sant, Foy fashions a tender ode to teenage melancholia that, in a bewitching final act, glides delicately into metaphysical, Apichatpongian territory. TIFF hails Foy a ​“visionary new artist.” We concur.

“Foy arrives as a filmmaker with an indisputable gift for atmosphere and a forthright faith in the potential of cinema to grasp the ungraspable, say the unsayable, and strive for meaning out beyond the edges.”

Jessica Kiang, Variety

“Foy stays keyed into how it feels to be young in the 21st century: that doomy sense that time is both hurtling away from you and never-ending.”

Saffron Maeve, Cinema Scope

“[A] remarkable debut … Beautifully conceived … Richly conveys the detail and feel of its world.”

Daniel Kasman, MUBI Notebook