Review: The Maiden (2022)

Some dreams are so vivid and so tactile that you swear you lived them despite knowing they’re not real. That’s what it feels like to watch Graham Foy’s The Maiden, his remarkable Canadian indie about teenage friends dealing with grief and wandering the ravines and backroads on the edge of Calgary, AB. The film is the sort of feature debut that is all too rare these days and all the more remarkable for it. It’s captivating and intuitive as it moves to its own rhythm and defines its own style.

There’s a touch of Terrence Malick in The Maiden’s elliptical focus on nature. There’s some David Gordon Green in its elements of rural magical realism. There’s the shadow of David Lynch in more than a few of its nightime scenes. There are even echoes of another remarkable Canadian indie, Andrew Cividino’s Sleeping Giant, in how it follows teenagers wandering the liminal spaces of their community. But the film’s logic and tone and mise-en-scène are all its own.

Here’s another reference point that only reinforces the film’s uniqueness: it operates almost like a slow cinema film (think Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Tsai Ming-liang), but with clearer character drama than you’ll find in those films. The Maiden takes its name from the graffiti tag sprayed by teenage best friends Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) and Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) on the train bridges outside their Calgary suburb. Colton and Kyle are skaters and outsiders and they spend all their time wandering the ravines and rivers and construction sites of their environment. They’re inseparable, inarticulate, and completely authentic with each other.

The film follows Colton and Kyle with an unobstructive camera that favours long takes and wide shots that incorporate them into the broader world. Foy and his cinematographer Kelly Jeffrey shoot on 16mm celluloid, and the choice gives the film a hazy, earthy quality that bakes its retrospective thematic interests into the very formal presentation. During the nighttime scenes, they shoot day-for-night to give a distinct, stylized colour presentation to the scenes, which makes it seem as if we’re watching a space on screen that transcends our reality. The languid rhythm, the sparse, ethereal music, and the stylized visual approach all affect the atmosphere of a dream. The 16mm and the restrained, patient stylistic approach also makes The Maiden the rare movie made and set in the 2020s that looks like it could’ve been made in the 1990s, even the 1970s. Its style and appeal are timeless.

The graffiti is not simply a means of explaining the title, but also instructive about the film’s interests in memory and our ties to the physical environment. About 20 minutes into the film, Kyle dies in an accident on a train bridge at night. Bereft, Colton spends his days retracing his steps with Kyle and closing himself off from others at school. Colton is almost comatose, the kind of kid who says he’s “good” to a concerned school counselor despite betraying all evidence of the opposite. He’s the kind of kid who can’t bring himself to express himself at all once Kyle is gone; Kyle was the one person he could be authentic with. Marcel T. Jiménez, who plays Colton, is devastating in an understated way. He lacks any and all pretense, yet also any and all aggression. Even his anger at other kids’ cruelty is mostly muted, a half-hearted effort to try to get himself to feel something other than grief.

As Colton wanders the ravines, he sees Kyle’s graffiti tag everywhere, a constant reminder of the friend he lost. But he also starts to see Kyle himself, glimpses of him smiling back at him in a brief flare of a flashlight or out of the corner of his eye hiding behind the door of his school locker. The Maiden is about the traces we leave behind, the signature we leave on the world and the people we knew. It captures the grief of absence and the way that memory keeps a person alive. But it also does something more. Uniquely, it’s about how a place captures the essence of a person, about how not only does Colton keep Kyle alive through his memories, but also how the rocks and the bridges and the rivers still hold his spirit. It’s the sort of film that could never be made in Toronto or other North American urban centres because it intuitively understands the link between people and place, the land and the soul. Cities are too loud and too busy to allow one person’s essence to linger with such vibrance; in the quiet, rural places, it’s easier to hear them still.

The Maiden also pivots midway through to focus on Hayley Ness’s Whitney, an autistic girl at Colton’s school. Colton disappears from the narrative, much as Kyle disappears from his life. After growing apart from her best friend, Whitney one day up and leaves, abandoning her home to wander through the same ravines and riverbanks where Kyle’s spirit lingers. The narrative branching gives The Maiden a mysterious, Mobius strip narrative structure almost like David Lynch’s Lost Highway or Christopher Nolan’s Memento. But narrative gamesmanship is not the goal here. The narrative divergence allows Foy to examine the same themes and environments from a different lens. It also demonstrates Foy’s interests in capturing some ineffable, mysterious qualities of life and death that are impossible to explicate in conventional narrative storytelling.

The Maiden creates a nuanced portrait of all three teenagers, but forgoes exposition or the usual emotional confrontations that are used to let us into the world of adolescents in other films. Rather, the film allows the moments of ellipsis, of words unsaid, of quiet looks stolen over shoulders, to convey the inner worlds of these kids. Such a tender approach to character also makes for some surprising tension. The muted quality of the performances and the patience of the visual storytelling force us to watch carefully and pay attention to visual cues, which build tension and tease some gruesome results. A scene in a school woodworking shop is particularly excruciating, but an earlier scene involving some target practice with a revolver constructs an equal atmosphere of dread.

The film also conjures a quiet, overwhelming emotional power through the association of its images and the unity of its intuitive filmmaking. The Maiden begins and ends with a black cat in a construction site. At the beginning, the cat is dead. At the end, it’s alive. The bookends, and the gradual transition from one to the other over the course of the film, summarizes the film’s thesis, but in the sort of intuitive, emotional way that isn’t explicable in words. The Maiden is felt more than understood, intuited rather than explained, and the kind of mysterious drama that provokes the same profound reaction as our most vivid, consequential dreams.

9 out of 10

The Maiden (2022, Canada)

Written and directed by Graham Foy; starring Jackson Sluiter, Marcel T. Jiménez, Hayley Ness.

Related Posts