The Maiden

Time is relative to everyone but perhaps most heightened for teenagers, beyond the regimented school periods, when the moment when you receive an email from a friend who is ditching you seems to make it stand still and when time outside class can seem to run unfettered by the rules that govern adults. Graham Foy has a feel for these strange currents and eddies, tapping into them for this feature that is so loose initially it almost seems to repel all sense of narrative.

Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) and Colton (Marcel T Jiménez) are having one of those long hazy days of summer that is filled and empty simultaneously. Attacking life at the gallop on their skateboards, we see their day unfold in fragments. They find a dead cat in a half-built house along with an ancient cassette player that plays Roger Miller’s Dear Heart - the hissy sound of which seems to come from a distant era - before ambling about by the river, with Kyle adding his elaborate graffiti tag “Maiden” as he goes. This single word that holds the meaning, “I was here”, is scattered in places all over town and it will also become, like the tape, a relic of sorts.

A train - the sound of which also arrives at a rush during key moments - brings tragedy and a wave of grief which will watch Colton surf in the coming days. The fragments continue, a counselling session, a sudden moment of drama in class, some of which work better than others, Foy’s desire to hang out in liminal spaces sometimes feeling so in between nothing and little else that it sorely tests the patience. Still, he finds grip as his film suddenly reveals it is not a single character study but two, as Whitney (Hayley Ness) - a girl we have just learned is missing - suddenly enters the frame when Colton comes across her sketchbook.

What happens next is wide open to interpretation as we watch Whitney’s progress, including encounters which could be real or imagined, either on her part or Colton’s. There is grief here, in its purest form for the loss of friendship in two very different ways, but the strongest feeling is one of longing for connection, not just to another human but to the natural landscape, the textures of which are captured beautifully by Kelly Jeffrey, especially when cloaked in the inky hues of night. For every shot when you wish Foy would learn melancholy doesn’t have to be meandering, there’s another of striking poignance. A moment, for example, when we see Whitney looking at various windows into different houses, each small scene being played out an opening into different worlds but also mysterious. Foy asks us to slip into the thought processes of a teenager where time is flexible and can easily fold in on itself. And though he doesn’t offer up a fairytale ending in the traditional sense, it is not without the magic of hope.