‘Tiger Stripes’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Amanda Nell Eu. Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Indonesia, Qatar. 2023. 94 mins

Tiger Stripes takes the viewer to a world within a world: the jungles of Malaysia, where an 12-year-old girl is about to be hit with the full force of puberty. Covered from head to toe but ready to break out of her hijab at the hint of a Tik Tok, Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) is chief amongst the many pleasures in Amanda Nell Eu’s feature debut. This film will be billed as an art-horror, perhaps marketed in the same way as Sundance title In My Mother’s Skin from fellow Southeast Asian developing film force The Philippines, but it truly growls in its depiction of the brutal nature of girl friendship and the shock of the menstrual metamorphosis.

 Growls in its depiction of the brutal nature of girl friendship

Special effects, slight as they are, are flimsy and may benefit from further finessing, as this low-budget film – put together by a United Nations of backers – finds its way out of Critics Week at Cannes, helped by winning the top awards there. To get to the lucrative genre audience, it may need a final helping hand. Interested arthouse crowds, however, will find much that is surprisingly universal and true in this well-observed, fiercely female-centred coming-of-age drama. 

The Malaysian millieu is unfamiliar, and Eu treats it as a character equal to Zaffan. The brightly-coloured school, where girls in white sit in the scorching sun. The dripping forest, which can turn from enchanted to threatening. The unfriendly grey tiles of the senior girls’ toilets. The diagetic sound. Phone footage shot from a teenage POV occasionally intrudes on Jimmy Gimferrer’s careful compositions in a heady mix which follows up on Eu’s award-winning short It’s Easier To Raise Cattle, which also examined the idea of a pubescent girl as a monster and the scratchiness of female friendship. Tiger Stripes follows a line from Carrie to Ginger Snaps, but it has its own story to tell. 

Both of Eu’s shorts dealt with Malaysian female folkloric vampires, but here it’s a beast, or a tiger, who is the threat. Zaffan is a lively, cheeky, quick-witted young girl when we first meet her: showing off a bra she has stashed under her tudung, or hijab. She’s keen to be free, too, jumping into the river and pranking around with her girl gang Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa), egging them on with dares and jokes. Farah seems a bit tougher than vivacious Zaffan or sweet-natured Mariam, and that will prove to be true once Zaffan gets her period – the first in her year to do so.

Mum and Dad aren’t much help – in fact Munah (Jun Lojong) reacts aggressively to this development, a not-unheard of response on the part of some mothers to the change in their daughters. Teachers are wildly unsympathetic (the school itself is a whole world of tartly well-observed religious-education idiocy). And everything shifts for Zaffan. Childish reactions are now dismissed as her being a teenage nightmare. Farah turns all her classmates against her, claiming she stinks. Her body feels like it’s rotting, and soon it does. 

There are parts of Tiger Stripes that feel unsophisticated, but that’s mostly in the execution of some difficult tonal shifts, with an exorcist figure clunkily half-played for smirks. There are other elements which feel exceptionally well-realised: the dynamic between Zaffan’s girl gang, her total alienation, and the sophistication of the natural world that Eu has captured with her technical team. Whatever constraints Eu was working under here, and that includes the Pandemic alongside funding and numerous co-production elements, they seem unlikely to recur as she goes forward with a career which should be as striking as her debut.