The Maiden Review | Fantastic Voyage

Filmmaker Graham Foy’s first feature effort, The Maiden, is an emotionally elliptical deep dive into the nature of memory and loss. It’s a film that’s almost impossible to explain thanks to its atypical structure, low-key magical realist tendencies, and carefully calculated sense of restraint, but at its core, The Maiden deals quite perceptively with a lot of emotional baggage that’s often either ignored or dealt with in melodramatic fashion by other filmmakers searching for easy answers. Nothing about The Maiden is easy outside of its free-flowing appearance, but that’s also what makes it a lingering presence.

Teenage best friends Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) and Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) spend their days killing time and trying to stay engaged with the bland suburban Alberta settings all around them. They break stuff, hang out at construction sites, skateboard, start shit, smoke, drink, and spray paint tags on overpasses running through serene ravines that are just far enough removed from the suburban blight to feel like an escape. They’re inseparable until an accident takes Kyle’s life. Unsure of what to do, Colton keeps returning to their hangout spot at the ravine, hoping to find echoes of his friend. There, he finds the journal of a young woman named Whitney (Hayley Ness), who has a story about a different kind of loss and a connection to Kyle.

The Maiden belongs to a long Canadian tradition of cinematic tales revolving around young people growing up, forming close bonds, and together learning about the sometimes shocking nature of the world they’re going to inherit as adults. But Foy’s take on such a well sown field looks at such narratives from a refreshingly microcosmic perspective. While major events forever alters the lives of these characters, The Maiden finds more beauty in the small details that lie before and beyond. Foy displays an acute understanding that sometimes the greatest meaning and emotional resonance comes from memories others might find fleeting.

Writer-director Foy (who has produced many acclaimed shorts and music videos under the pseudonym Fantavious Fritz) has crafted a film about what remains in the wake of not only death, but also more general forms of change. An early scene where Colton and Kyle discover a dead cat in the basement of a seemingly abandoned construction site proves to set the tone for everything to come. This is a place of seemingly endless promise for those who come to it, but the spectre of unfulfilled dreams hangs over everything like a pall. Foy has defined these characters subtly, but with clear emotional boundaries. Their everyday behaviour speaks not to a sense of ennui, but rather to an easily relatable ordinariness. The Maiden doesn’t want to be a sullen portrait of teenage adjustment and development, but rather as an examination of physical, mental, and spiritual escape. Below the tough talk and hormone driven posturing of teenage boys lies an emotional softness, even in the biggest jerk in town (Kaleb Blough).

The ravine setting of The Maiden is particularly resonant in that respect because there probably isn’t a person alive that doesn’t have a specific place in their mind that they find themselves returning to for reasons they might not fully comprehend. For these kids, it’s the ravine. I personally think back to a rather dull looking, clearly polluted pond and the woods surrounding it that wasn’t too far from where I grew up. It was both a hang out spot for my friends and I – where positive and negative experiences unfolded regularly – and also someplace I could go on my own to just sit there and be present. I knew nothing of mindfulness or anything like that as a teenager, but it was a place that called to me on an instinctual level, and in my mind I still find myself returning there, both to those memories and to nothing in particular at all other than staring out over the water. The Maiden is one of the only films to capture this distinct sense of belonging to a place that exists both in the mind and in the real world, and capturing the different meanings of such experiences.

While the relaxed pacing of The Maiden is appreciated, the film does occasionally lapse into repetitiveness, particularly in the first half. Once the focus pivots towards Whitney’s perspective, Foy freshens things up with a newfound sense of poignancy. The narrative is sometimes hard to pin down, and the closest thing I can think of in terms of comparative pacing is David Lynch’s Lost Highway, only nothing like that film in terms of tone. It’s original in its desire to entrance and possibly confound the viewer. The naturally lit visuals serve the story well, but The Maiden demands to be seen in a theatre for those images to be properly experienced. It’s a film that the viewer needs to be locked in with on every level for it to work. For some, that could be a challenge, but even viewers who don’t totally get what Foy is striving for will be able to understand the feeling and weight of it all.

The Maiden opens at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto on Wednesday, May 10, 2023, with filmmaker Q&As following screenings on May 10, 11, & 12. It opens at Winnipeg Cinematheque, the Roxy in Saskatoon, and Sudbury Indie Cinema on Friday, May 12, at Cinema Moderne in Montreal, Cinecenta in Victoria, and The Westdale in Hamilton on May 18, at The Plaza in Calgary, Metro Cinema in Edmonton, and The Cinematheque in Vancouver on May 19, at The Film House in St. Catherines on May 20, at Revue Cinema in Toronto on May 21, and at ByTowne Cinema in Ottawa on May 30.

Click here to see the trailer for The Maiden.