Kyle peppers his speech with f-bombs, more a verbal tic than a display of actual aggression, and spray-paints graffiti on any available surface - later, the ubiquity of his tag, “Maiden,” will become an ongoing motif.
Suddenly, we like them, these languid, loose-limbed lost boys.Īlready it’s clear that while both are outsiders, Kyle, from some angles reminiscent of River Phoenix in “Stand By Me,” is the leader and Colton, a lanky lad with a Sideshow Bob hairdo and a lolloping gait, the sidekick. They build and decorate a little raft and send its corpse off down the river like in a Viking farewell. But just when it seems there’s not much more to them than this idle boneheaded shuffling and jostling, they decide to give the cat a rather touching send-off. They discover a dead cat in an abandoned building site, and with the kind of grossed-out fascination peculiar to teenage boys, poke at it with stones and sneakers. They talk about nothing and everything and dare each other to board down a steep grassy hillside. They skateboard aimlessly down dull suburban streets. Jiménez) hanging out during one of those empty yet paradoxically eventful days that we all had as teenagers. The distanced register in which much of the film plays is a deliberate choice, as indicated by the far more vivid opening, in which we first meet Kyle (Jackson Sluiter) and his best friend Colton (Marcel T. “ The Maiden” is magnificently moody, but only intermittently moving. But whether the elegance of his aspirations is quite done justice by the sometimes distractingly elliptical nature of his storytelling is another matter.
But whether it’s the roaming spirits of local teenagers taken before their time, or the grief of the friends they leave behind, or the lingering shadow of a large swathe of Gus Van Sant’s noughties filmography, or perhaps simply the more fully embodied drama whose outlines are just discernible through the pellucid layers of metaphysics, mournfulness and 16mm grain, it’s very hard to say.įoy arrives as a filmmaker with an indisputable gift for atmosphere and a forthright faith in the potential of cinema to grasp the ungraspable, say the unsayable, and strive for meaning out beyond the edges of everything we traditionally believe to be meaningful. Something or someone is definitely haunting the grassy Calgary ravine where much of Graham Foy’s ambitiously amorphous debut takes place.
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