Director: Amanda Nell Eu
Stars: Zafreen Zairizal, Deena Ezral, Shaheizy Sam
Western genre cinema has a long mined coming-of-age terrors for their gruesomeness, manifesting primal fears about our changing bodies in memorable – even iconic – ways. But it’s rare that we’re afforded either a feminine perspective on the initial onslaught of menstruation, and rarer still to find one coming to our shores from as afar as Malaysia. In many ways, then, we can consider ourselves privileged to have the opportunity courtesy of Amanda Nell Eu, whose Tiger Stripes presents an alternate perspective on female growing pains, if not a consistently successful one.
Meet Zaffan (Zajfreen Zairizal), a fairly typical 12-year-old enrolled at an all girl’s school, looking to advance her grades to get into a prestigious boarding college. She has friends, they learn TikTok dances; the globalisation of western fads are all present and correct (spot the ubiquitous Disney characters emblazoned on bags and drinks bottles). But when Zaffan becomes the first girl in her class to get her period, it is the beginning of a series of hellish transformations as Nell Eu starts manifesting the monstrous feminine.
While Zaffan finds herself going through a series of grotesque physical changes – starting with a nasty skin rash that she keeps concealed – the way her so-called friends perceive her offers a far more devastating gear change. Overnight her bestie Farah (Deena Ezral) turns on Zaffan ferociously, first steering their well-meaning cohort Miriam (Piqa) to her cause, before increasing her campaign to include the entire class. Loss of bladder control does little to help Zaffan shake off a new found stigma, one that is often rooted in patriarchal idioms of slut shaming. Zaffan’s only concession to any kind of sexual awakening amounts to a handful of cheeky doodles in a sketchbook. Nothing that warrants the kind of pack ostracisation depicted here. But girls will be girls.
Tiger Stripes feathers in some culturally-specific folk tale aspects to its growing supernatural tale, as first Zaffan and then other girls in the class catch sight of a mysterious woman inhabiting the nearby trees, rendered all the more eerie thanks to her glowing eyes. As Zaffan’s transformations grow more pronounced, so a malady spreads through the class, as though her revenge is being meted out through some intangible witchcraft, though Zaffan seems as baffled and disturbed as everyone else.
Either by design or (I imagine more likely) by constraint, Tiger Stripes remains something of a caged beast, prone to escalating scenes to a shrill fever pitch before abruptly resetting with a cut to later or the next day. It makes for a frustrating experience, as Nell Eu will gear us up for something vivid or transformative, only to hit the reset. Not only does this tendency trigger our FOMO, it creates a dissonance in the narrative. Two steps forward; one step back.
While the young actors do their best to sell the involved interplay of their characters, Nell Eu’s documentation is often quite passive. On the one hand that can feel refreshing. Horror cinema wiped clean of many of the tropes, smoke and mirrors that we’re accustomed to. On the other, it can all feel undersold and underdeveloped.
When special effects are implemented – be they special make-up or visual tricks – the results often feel unfortunately lacklustre. Given the overfamiliarity of the subject matter (Tiger Stripes feels like a pre-teen retread of genre staples like Carrie, Ginger Snaps, Jennifer’s Body, Raw etc), what Nell Eu’s film gains by virtue of its unique-feeling origins, it loses in its occasionally amateurish style. Add a distinct lack of engagement with the myths and legends that are culturally significant to Malaysia, and Tiger Stripes can feel obtuse or even perplexingly filleted. Some transitions are so sharp as to suggest that it may have been the victim of rather brutal edits.
Tiger Stripes seeks to reframe the monstrous female – make it prideful and primal – but must the path be so paved with pain and self-loathing? In spite of an apparent urge to explore how society encourages women to shame one another through behaviours learned at a frighteningly young age, Tiger Stripes frequently blunts itself with cliché visual metaphors and poorly played humour. Any given scene that’s taken over by the school’s laughably ineffectual faculty or opportunist pseudo-physician Dr Rahim (Shaheizy Sam) feels like a detour into significantly weaker territory. Suddenly – sadly – the film’s relatively trim 95 minutes start feeling awfully drawn out.
The Lost Highway Hotel 