TIGER STRIPES Poster | ©2024 Dark Star Pictures/Netflix

Rating: TV-14
Stars: Zafreen Zairizal, Deena Ezral, Piqa, Jun Loiong, Khairunazwan Rodzy, Shaheizy Sam, Fatimah Abu Bakar, Bella Rahim
Writer: Amanda Nell Eu
Director: Amanda Nell Eu
Distributor: Dark Star Pictures/Netflix
Release Date: June 14, 2024 (theatrical); July 9, 2024 (VOD)

TIGER STRIPES won the Cannes Film Festival Critics’ Week Grand Prize Award. It can best be described as consistently engaging and agreeably weird.

Horror as a metaphor for the start of adolescence is nothing new, but director/writer Amanda Nell Eu still makes TIGER STRIPES feel fresh. She is helped in this by a setting that will be new to at least most American viewers: a small town in Malaysia.

Something else that makes TIGER STRIPES seem different is that Eu keeps us entirely on the side of our protagonist, twelve-year-old Zaffan Azman (Zafreen Zairizal). Zaffan is a senior in her town’s school for young girls. She is hoping to get into boarding school and has good grades.

But Zaffan, like many other girls her age the world round, enjoys making selfie videos of dancing to pop songs, showing off her new bra in the bathroom, and playing with her best friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa) in the nearby forest.

While Zaffan and her friends all wear school uniforms that include a hijab head covering, they still can enroll in cadet training, an outdoors course that seems halfway between military preparation and the Girl Scouts. Zaffan also has clashes with her concerned mother (Jun Loiong), who wears blue jeans at home, but is furious when Zaffan comes home with bare arms.

When menstruation hits, Zaffan is met with a mixture of curiosity, envy, superstition, and disgust from her peers. Farah and Mariam share a local legend about Ina (Bella Rahim), a schoolgirl who became so overwhelmed by her periods that she ran off into the wild and has never returned.

Zaffan has the usual physical challenges that come with this transition, but she also has some uncommon ones in both behavior and physiology.

Part of the charm of TIGER STRIPES is that we can’t tell which way it will jump – into domestic drama, middle-school crisis, fantasy, horror, social commentary, or some combination of all of the above.

At age twelve, fights with friends can really be existential crises, and standing up for oneself might as well be turning into a magical wild animal.

Filmmaker Eu doesn’t cop out and say that it’s all a metaphor – those around Zaffan observe her changes as well, and there’s a different kind of evidently supernatural experience that impacts some other characters.

Eu makes marvelous use of the forest. Little wonder that it speaks to Zaffan’s primal self. It speaks to the audience as well.

For those concerned about the gore factor, the periods are discussed rather than extensively shown, although we do see Zaffan (as is apparently the custom, which will have Western viewers wincing in sympathy) having to rinse out her pad before disposing of it. There are also deaths of wild animals, but these occur offscreen.

Zairizal is exemplary as Zaffan, and Ezral naturalistically flows from playful to malicious.

TIGER STRIPES is an excellent surreal coming-of-age film. In Malay, with English subtitles.

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