Tiger Stripes

Amanda Nell Eu’s feature debut is a lively coming-of-age story that mixes the mundane and the supernatural with ease.

Eu smartly weaves that universality together with local myths and legends, and the result is a little eerie and unsettling, a film about dark things we’re afraid to speak about.

The message is not always clear, but it’s an entertaining ride.

Eu smartly keeps a distance between the two sides of the story, before drawing them together in mystery and violence.

From the exuberant credits and opening sequence through to the end, “Tiger Stripes” is the work of a confident new talent whose next work will be eagerly awaited.

The drama of girlhood is familiar cinematic territory, and though it might garner a smaller audience than Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret or You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, Tiger Stripes is a welcome addition to the pack.

Tiger Stripes may not have a very original premise, but it delivers a beautiful and incisive story of the monstrous feminine that can stand alongside the great films that came before, and deserves to be just as celebrated.

‘Tiger Stripes’ is the kind of film many of us would have loved to have as we were hitting puberty...It effectively captures the horrors of puberty alongside the awkward and uncomfortable moments that still haunt most of us.

Tiger Stripes is one of the best coming-of-age films released in 2024, and it is refreshing how it uses fantasy to address concerns about transitioning into adolescence. [Full review in Spanish]

In a narrative that sees a collision between tradition and modernity, repression and expression, and childhood and adolescence, it also struggles itself between highbrow and B-movie tendencies.