The Maiden (Graham Foy, 2022) (Patreon)

The Maiden is the first feature film from Graham Foy, a Calgary-based director who released a number of short films under the moniker Fantavious Fritz. It's a solid debut, and this past September at TIFF, it was heralded as part of a mini-New Wave in Canadian filmmaking, along with two other new films, Concrete Valley and Queens of the Qing Dynasty. Moreover, The Maiden is one of a number of 2022 films that centers on the mourning process, and the specific trauma that accompanies the death of a young person. 

If I'm going a bit out of my way to provide context for The Maiden, it's because it is a rather small film, one that has a bit more to say when echoing off other similar works. The film's grainy, sun-kissed ambiance, and the particular way Foy articulates the broad non-spaces of suburban Calgary, are the real star of the show here, particularly since The Maiden is a film willing to take its time in arriving at a very clear destination. Where it runs into trouble, actually, is all the material surrounding these tonal interstices. 

In the opening sequence, we are introduced to two friends, Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) and Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) as they skateboard down a nondescript street in a upper middle class housing development. It's new build, as we see when the characters wander into the outskirts where they wander through cleared tracts and half-built homes. There's a train trellis that stands over the Bow River, and while walking the tracks at night, the boys are surprised by a train. Although we do not see it, we learn that Kyle was killed, either by the train itself of a fall from the bridge.

The Maiden is particularly good at depicting the utter helplessness that seizes a community when a young person dies. Teachers and guidance counselors offer their faux-wise pronouncements, and keep telling Colton they are there for him. But the platitudes ring hollow, and ultimately Colton is left alone with his grief. The memory of Kyle is virtually omnipresent, since he spray-painted his personal tag ("Maiden") all over the community. This is a powerful approach to displaying the presence of the past, and it's Foy's single best creative decision.

But The Maiden is less capable when it comes to narrative action. Early in the film, a classmate of Colton's named Tucker (Kaleb Blough) harasses the skaters from his pick-up truck. His cowboy hat (worn even indoors, as if a teacher would not insist he remove it) marks him as the bad guy, and when a fundraising benefit at school involves the whole student body wearing cowboy hats, it's a pretty clumsy way of conveying Colton's isolation. Unsurprisingly, Colton and Tucker eventually reconcile and tentatively become friends, a gesture toward life moving on in Kyle's absence.

The back half of The Maiden is even more ungainly, as Colton discovers the lost diary of Whitney (Hayley Ness), a local girl who went missing shortly after Kyle's death. As we see Colton read the journal, the film adopts Whitney's point of view. We see how she is abandoned by her best friend (Siena Yee), and can gather by her reactions to different situations that she is neuro-atypical. Out by the railroad tracks, Whitney meets Kyle, and they start to hang out together.

The notable creative gambit in the final third of The Maiden is that we do not know whether we are watching an actual flashback, Colton's own vision of what these two absent teens might have done in each other's company, or even a ghostly tryst between Kyle and Whitney, happening in the present but unseen by the living. This move seems to be the reason why a number of commentators have compared The Maiden to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, but Foy's handling of a possible spirit world is far more downcast and mundane than anything Joe would do.

A much more apposite comparison is with the high-end films of Gus Van Sant. There are shots in the high school hallway that are direct quotations of Elephant, and the overall vibe of The Maiden owes quite a lot to Paranoid Park. But in its focus on liminal suburbia as a space of unexpected revelation and ordinary spirituality, The Maiden is much more of a piece with the films of Matthew Porterfield, especially Hamilton and Putty Hill. Although The Maiden is an undoubtedly accomplished debut, it seems that Foy has not yet reconciled his competing impulses, and the result is an awkward graft of slow cinema and teen portraiture. Once he hits his stride, Foy may well be a significant new director.