Writer and Director: Amanda Nell Eu
Puberty is tough, especially for a girl. This good-spirited horror from Malaysia demonstrates just how difficult it is for girls to navigate the journey from childhood to womanhood. Amanda Nell Eu’s metaphors may be a little obvious at times but there’s still plenty to enjoy in this polished debut.
Zaffan is the first in her class to go through puberty. Underneath her school uniform, she wears a – presumably ‘borrowed’ – bra. Out of her friends, Zaffan is the most effervescent and happy-go-lucky – wild even. However, when she has her first period, she is dumped by her best friends Farah and Mariam. In Malaysian culture, a largely Muslim country, this step into womanhood is attached to shame. At school, Zaffan has to stand outside the classroom when the pupils are at prayer. It is haram for menstruating women to perform ritual prayers.
There are some countries where this pivotal first period is celebrated, but in other cultures societies still see menstruation as something embarrassing or shameful that should be concealed from others. We don’t seem any more enlightened when Germaine Greer proclaimed ‘If you think you are emancipated you might consider the idea of tasting your own menstrual blood – if it makes you sick, you’ve got a long way to go, baby’. That these words from 1970’s The Female Eunuch still shock proves Greer’s point.
In Tiger Stripes, Zaffan’s friends shun her, saying that she smells and call her a slut. They scare her with stories about the demons that appear if menstrual blood isn’t washed off the pads before they are thrown away. They tell about Ina, who after her first period, went crazy and disappeared into the jungle.
Of course, this ritual of girlhood has been explored in horror before, most famously in Carrie. Tiger Stripes is less melodramatic, but both capture the isolation of its heroines. Carrie’s rage manifests in destructive telekinesis, but Zaffan’s anger and confusion turn her into a beast, possibly a tiger, an animal that sometimes roams into the village. There’s another symbolic animal on screen, too – the caterpillar, which, of course, will metamorphose into a butterfly. Eu’s imagery is not always subtle.
Zaffan’s transformation is so startling that an outbreak of hysteria engulfs the school. Not since The Falling have so many girls collapsed shaking to the floor. Even some teachers are affected as the contagion runs amok. Every good horror needs an exorcist and Shaheizy Sam’s Dr Rahim, called in to cure the hysteria, is a wonderfully smug creation, clearly a quack but with just enough menace to make him dangerous.
But the film really belongs to its young actors, especially Zafreen Zairizal who, as Zaffan, has to display almost every emotion between sorrow and joy. She is supported well by Deena Ezral whose Farah is disloyal and opportunistic and by Piqa whose Mariam is eventually drawn to Zaffan’s turmoil. These young actors have great futures on the back of their utterly convincing performances in this important examination of growing up.
Tiger Stripes is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2023.
