Another week, another foreign-language horror film. Actually, there’s been a bit of a buzz around Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes for a little while, especially after it won the critics’ award for best film by a new director at last year’s Cannes. It’s still not showing at the mainstream cinemas near me, of course, which are stuffed with cartoons and Will Smith movies and the odd recent well-reviewed film (Challengers and La chimera are hanging in there; rather disappointingly, The Fall Guy and the new Planet of the Apes aren’t).
La chimera has started its run at the independent local cinema of which I am the co-owner (just me and about two thousand other people), and due to the unique way in which it operates and the fact I arrived very early in case it sold out (it didn’t even come close) I walked into the auditorium for a screening of Tiger Stripes while the closing credits for La chimera were still rolling. This at least gave me chance to chinwag with some bright young things about Alice Rohrwacher’s movie (they asked me what I’d thought about it, apparently not having noticed that I hadn’t, in fact, been sitting two rows in front of them for the previous two hours). I said I’d sort of enjoyed it and we discussed what we thought had actually been going on and then they cleared off into a rainy tea-time, leaving the auditorium to definitely not fill up: Malaysian horror films aren’t the big popular draw you might conceivably have expected them to be.
But never mind. One of the pleasures of a visit to something a bit arthousey is the sense of visiting a new conceptual and cultural space, the fact that you are in a very real sense taking a step into unknown territory. This was really rammed home by the start of the movie, which opens in the toilets of a girls-only school somewhere in Malaysia. But some things change and some things don’t and the girls are making a TikTok video involving some energetic and slightly provocative dancing from one of them – this is Zaffan, played by Zafreen Zairizal (yup, we’re heavy on the Zs this sentence). She is a bit of precocious non-conformist which inevitably leads to conflict with her conservative traditionalist parents.
And then – well, if you’ll permit me a small digression, back at the start of the year I read Sara Pascoe’s Animal, a fairly illuminating and thought-provoking book about female body-awareness (I imagine that Pascoe and Eu could have a really interesting conversation on this topic). Pasco writes a lot about how the conversations about women’s bodies have been framed and shaped by male voices, which is why commercials for sanitary and depilatory products remain absurdly twee and oblique, and argues that more openness about this can only be a good thing.
So, in a spirit of straightforward maturity, I’m going to avoid any over-delicate or ironic euphemisms and say that the inciting incident of the movie comes when Zaffan is the first girl in the school to get her period. This is presented with matter-of-fact naturalism (though possibly there’s a bit of a Carrie reference later on), as are the responses of the people around her – her mother declares she is now ‘dirty’ and she is barred from attending prayers with the rest of her classmates. Even her former friends now treat her with revulsion and disgust; it’s clear that most of their information comes from hearsay and folklore rather than informed medical sources.
This being a horror movie, things inevitably get worse for Zaffan, as she starts to find other changes afflicting her body – not ones usually associated with the menstrual cycle, either, for her fingernails start falling out and she gets a severe rash across her arms and legs in particular. All of this is presented with such convincing ickiness I was almost put in mind of what happened to Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Possibly even worse, Zaffan finds herself afflicted by visions of a strange, somewhat grotesque woman with glowing eyes, watching her from a perch up a tree.
It’s a decent set-up for a horror movie, but it seems like Eu (who wrote and directed) may not be that familiar with the genre – either that, or she’s more interested in the feminist angle to the story. It certainly takes a while for the body-horror element to get going in the film, and even once it does it doesn’t feel like the director is in a hurry to actually go anywhere with it: there’s a significant sense of the film just marking time, with the connection between scenes not always clear.
Of course, this may just be because this is a low-budget Malaysian movie made with the assistance of the usual patchwork quilt of foreign investment bodies. It doesn’t seem like a project which is dripping in spare cash; as noted, the early stages of Zaffan’s weretiger transformation are not badly done, but it pains me to say that the full make-up from the later stages of the film is somewhat risible. Some of the camera tricks which Eu ends up using to depict Zaffan moving with inhuman speed, strength, and agility are honestly just primitive compared to the competent naturalism of the rest of it.
I’ve no idea if Eu has any kind of in-depth familiarity with the horror genre, but my guess would be no; the film occasionally has a slightly odd atmosphere but it’s never frightening and never has any sense of danger about it. Apart from one scene with a quack faith healer (Shaheizy Sam plays a character billed as a ‘snake oil exorcist’) there’s relatively little traditional horror content to the film (and even this mostly happens off-screen). The performances from the younger cast members are commendable, though. But as a horror film using this particular metaphor it’s less successful than, say, Ginger Snaps and its sequels.
I try to stay open to new ideas and as a piece of feminist film-making there is nothing objectionable about Tiger Stripes – but as an actual horror movie there is little here to trouble us beyond the novelty of the setting. Which is a real shame, for there are genuine flashes of potential in the film. I wish I’d liked it more.
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