‘Foreigner’ Review: A Darker Mean Girls With A Dash of Heathers, Carrie & Jennifer’s Body [FrightFest 2025]

As a Millennial who grew up with toxic teenage magazines, a boom in diet trends, and coming-of-age films like Mean Girls and Clueless, Foreigner by writer/director Ava Maria Safai was a no-brainer at FrightFest. Safai’s definitely puts the MEAN in Mean Girls, while also combining the sense of belonging with supernatural horror, the immigration experience and the teenage struggles. Being a teenage girl in the 2000s can definitely be hell on earth, and the filmmaker reminds us of that in a thought-provoking, unsettling, and enthralling nostalgia trip. 

That Foreigner is the darker version of Mean Girls is crystal clear, but there’s also a dash of Heathers, a splash of Carrie and a whole lot of Jennifer’s Body going on in this feature. Even the credits are presented in the typical yearbook style characteristic of the genre. If this movie instantly takes you back to your own teenage years, don’t blame us. Blame that glamorous advertisement for ‘Die Blonde’. Who knew that a box of hair dye would hold such great power over teenage girls? Well, many of us, but apparently not Yasamin (Rose Dehgan) or Yasi to her friends and family. As an Iranian teenager who just moved to Canada with her dad (Ashkan Nejati) and grandmother (Maryam Sadeghi), she wants to belong.

Being trendy, skinny (duh!) and blond (obviously!) are the keys to success for a teenage girl, and that’s precisely what Rachel (Chloë MacLeod) and her two minions, Emily (Victoria Wadell) and Kristen (Talisa Mae Stewart), know. They’re all of the above, and for some reason, they do share the extremely unnerving smile of Smile. Despite the empty niceties and long-standing internalised prejudices, the trio decides to adopt Yasi as their pet project.

However, no matter how many TikTok videos (even before they became a thing) the ‘friends’ create, Rachel always reminds Yasi she’s not like them. Unlike in other similar films, the teenager is aware of her friends’ prejudices and the views on her culture, but she still hangs out with them, which highlights the true negative power of peer pressure. To cope with the increasing social influence, the high school politics and the possessive obsession to belong, Yasi tends to the bottle. A bottle of blond hair dye that is.

Just like alcohol, hair colouring can also be toxic and not only for the hair. While Safai and cinematographer Saarthak Taneja showed already some brief snippets of the darkness hanging over Yasi through the repetition of the same dialogues, flickering lights, and gloomy flashbacks, they raise the stakes from the moment the blonde idealisation truly takes over. However, don’t expect blood, gore and mind-twisting supernatural powers until the very end.

For a film clearly inspired by body horror, its visceral element is restrained. There are certainly aspects of demonic possession and gore but none of these elements carries the same weight as the immigrant narrative. That might put some people off, especially if you’re a seasoned horror fan, but that relatively gentle usage of blood and gore is precisely the point. A splatterfest would detract from the true horror element in this feature, the sense of belonging. An aspect that Safai and her cast and crew nail.

With a rich and spot-on performance by Dehgan, Yasi becomes a different, darker and slightly demonic version of herself. From swapping her traditional home-cooked food for the bland school meals to exclusively interacting with English language content, the more Yasi abandons her roots and herself, the more she’s consumed by an unknown darkness. It’s only a matter of time before that darkness completely takes over her life.

Dehgan perfectly merges the raw vulnerability of a teenage immigrant with the despair of someone losing grip on who they are, steadily but slowly. While her transformation is one we’ve seen many times before, it still leaves a massive bleak impact on the audience. Not only because the director herself went through a similar phase, but also because many young girls still struggle with the same feeling every day. Safai isn’t afraid to even subtly hint at self-harm, something that’s sadly still a part of too many teenage lives. While MacLeod (Sugar Rot) delivers an all-too-familiar yet charming and frightening performance, it’s the acting by Nejati and Sadeghi that leaves the biggest impression. You genuinely feel their characters’ love and care, as well as their helplessness and anger, as they watch the grip of the ’00 culture on their (grand)daughter tighten with each passing day.

What starts as a playful yet dangerous take on the coming-of-age story soon evolves into a sensitive social satire/commentary before transitioning into an overdramatic body horror. Right at the end, the movie relies too heavily on genre elements, leaving you wanting a bit more from the climax. Nevertheless, Foreigner remains an intriguing and exciting feature that showcases why Safai is a new face in the film industry that you should watch.

Foreigner had its world premiere at Fantasia International Film Festival 2025 and UK premiere at FrightFest 2025. No release date yet.