Foreigner is writer/director Ava Maria Safai's second feature film, though you wouldn't know it from how assured and eloquent it is.

This is a movie that tackles complex themes and emotions with grace that most matured filmmakers well into their careers struggle to achieve. As an exploration of identity and assimilation, it is brave and intensely humane, but also mischievious and witty when you least expect it.

Set during the time when Friends was still a thing and phones were only just becoming smarter, Foreigner is the story of Yasamin, a Persian teenager who has moved to Toronto to start anew after the death of her mother. Yasamin's father is overbearing, though he means well, and her grandmother acts as a bridge of understanding between the generations. Yet for all their good intentions, nobody can prepare Yasamin for the horrors of high school, especially in an environment loaded with aggressions of all kinds.

The setup is familiar, even traditional, yet how Safai approaches her subjects is everything but tried and tested. Imagine a mixture of David Lynch, Nickelodeon, and Greener Grass, and you're in the ballpark.

By the time Yasamin meets Rachel (Chloë Macleod), she's already crumbling. It doesn't take much for the peer pressure to kick in. Before Yasamin knows it, she's changing into someone – something – that she can't even begin to describe.

It's not the first time horror has used body horror as a metaphor for growing pains. Another great Canadian cult classic, Ginger Snaps, toyed with the metaphor as a werewolf story two decades ago. Here, Safai turns her gaze inward, into body horror on an internal level. What happens when we lose our sense of self? What good is a body if the soul is adrift.

As the situation spirals out of control, Safai deftly balances tone and terror with ease. There are elements of the supernatural and even exorcisms, yet it never feels like the film doesn't know where it's going. As an experience, it feels therapeutic because you know Safai won't punch down or take the easy way out. Even the explosive finale feels earned, because it deals with emotions that are universal.

Like Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette or Virgin Suicides, Safai captures the sinking sensation you get when you realize you're screaming in a crowded room to no reactions. It is an existential dread, feeling completely alone, and it is a difficult emotion to express in film.

Somehow, Safai accomplishes it, and in the process announces herself as a major talent to look out for.