Director: Amanda Nell Eu

Stars: Zafreen Zaizal, Deena Erzal, Piqa, Shaeheizy Sam

Shades of ‘Ginger Snaps’ and ‘Mean Girls’ in the impressive feature debut from Malaysian writer-director Amanda Nell Eu. Zaffan (Zairizal) is the free-spirited and popular twelve-year-old girl at a conservative Islamic religious girls’ school. We are introduced to her in the school toilets as she swaps her traditional uniform for a vest top to film a TikTok dance video. She is watched by two friends: the judgmental, probably jealous Farrah (Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa), the sweet natured mediator in the trio. When Zaffan becomes the first pupil to begin menstruating, the bitchy Farrah sees an opportunity to undermine her friend and bolster her own status at the school. After glimpsing a strange humanoid figure with glowing red eyes crouched high in the treetops, like one of the spirits from Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonme, the increasingly isolated Zaffan, who has been made to feel dirty by family and friends, begins to embrace her growing feral side. This puberty allegory throws up some canny insights on repression and sexuality, while Eu elicits very fine naturalistic performances from her young leads. The effects may be a little shonky at times, as the uncanny begins to encroach on school life, but Jimmy Gimferrer’s piercingly bright and colourful cinematography imbues the picture with an otherworldly fairy-tale quality while the percussive score, from the splendidly named Gabber Operandis, is genuinely eerie and unnerving.

David Willoughby

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