The Maiden Review: Graham Foy’s Amorphous Vision of Life Interrupted by Death

In writer-director Graham Foy’s arresting debut feature, The Maiden, the afterlife might not be so far away. Embedded in its deceptively simple premise is something of a ghost story reminiscent of myth. At the film’s start, Colton (Marcel T. Jiménez) follows his best friend, Kyle (Jackson Sluiter), through the forests and underpasses of Calgary’s outer reaches. The wanderings of these wayward teens include spray-painting debris, skating over cracked asphalt, and provoking their cowboy hat-wearing schoolmate Tucker (Kaleb Blough).

This gently mysterious depiction of teenage ennui is capped by the discovery of a house under construction in an open grassy field. There, like something out of Blue Velvet, the two find a tape recorder with a cassette of Andy Williams’s dreary “Dear Heart” inside. The kids then stumble upon a dead black cat in the site’s basement and decide, in a moving gesture that succinctly attests to their sensitivity, to create a funeral rite for it. As the cat floats down a river on a manufactured wooden board strewn with handpicked flowers, Foy is already having us ponder this place as something akin to the River Styx. If the traditional boundaries between our world and the next don’t exist, where do the dead go when they’re gone?

Before The Maiden’s central tragedy occurs, Foy emphasizes Colton and Kyle’s inseparability by framing the two primarily in tandem. Though Kyle is the one who literally leads, tagging an underpass and initiating jumps off of bridges into the murky waters below, it’s Colton who seems to lead more from the heart. As the camera catches glimpses of various parts of their bodies, as well as a half-eaten apple and ants scurrying across Kyle’s hand, Colton is lost in thought, more focused on their collective futurity than whatever excitement he gains from their hangout. And as the two discuss their future plans, Kyle scoffs when Colton asks him where he thinks he’ll be 10 years down the line. “I don’t even know what I’m doing tomorrow.”

The placement of this gentle philosophizing right before Kyle’s untimely death on a stretch of elevated railroad tracks might feel too opportune, but it’s consistent with Foy’s canny elucidation of the piecemeal nature of memory. Shot on 16mm, the entire film has the tactile feeling of grief in action. The rich, grainy texture of the film stock keeps The Maiden on a bizarre temporality, simultaneously feeling like images of the past and of an entire realm altogether.

The film, then, suggests a pointillist depiction of loss—of impressions and feelings, the way we remember how a leaf was illuminated by the lights of an approaching train, how a helicopter roared overhead between massive cloud formations. The Maiden is concerned with more intimate, smaller moments in time within the larger continuum of people’s lives, as when Colton is glimpsed sobbing in his mother’s arms. And it’s in the cumulative collection of erstwhile innocuous imagery that the film most clearly announces its intentions, channeling an evergreen curiosity for how our everyday world shapes us in big and especially small ways.

As Colton ambles through life without Kyle, he finds a colorful, well-worn journal nestled in between rocks near one of the underpasses where they used to hang out. It’s then that the film shifts, swiftly and with determination, away from Colton to focus on Whitney (Hayley Ness), the journal’s owner. And after the withdrawn Whitney is abandoned by her friend June (Siena Yee), this quiet child moves toward what seems like a preordained encounter with Kyle.

The Maiden purposefully doesn’t make explicit whether we’re watching Whitney and Kyle before the former’s amorphously depicted demise or, more likely, if their paths are intertwining in some purgatorial vision of the afterlife. Foy introduces their relationship well into the film, and, aided in no small part by an elegant editing job by Brendan Mills, plays with the viewer’s sense of temporality in ways that are at once mystical and unnerving.

From his meditative approach to the narrative’s double structure, Foy is clearly indebted to the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. He’s artfully attuned to the private experience of grief and the mental fog that comes with it. In one of the film’s most pointed images, Colton is the only hat-less kid in a sea of students wearing cowboy hats, his bright red hoodie shrouding his mass of curly hair—a sore thumb in the hyper-focused social strata of high school.

In the end, The Maiden is defined by its preoccupation with doubling. Colton spends much of his time trying, sometimes literally, to illuminate the spaces where Kyle once stood. He perches on top of a hill where the two once biked down to the waters below and clicks a flashlight on and off at a frequent tagging spot. This fixation on absence, of a piece with Foy’s approach to elevating the mundane into the archetypal, recalls nothing less than Monet’s paintings of haystacks. Indeed, images of empty spaces are metonyms for grief across The Maiden, almost bittersweet reminders of the potency of that which is left behind in the aftermath of death.