Tiger Stripes review – coming-of-age body horror releases the monster inside

There are some arresting images and bright performances in this bristling debut feature from Malaysian film-maker Amanda Nell Eu, who heads off into a jungle of the mind for a supernatural-realist drama and coming-of-age chiller about the female body and sexuality, with hints of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. It is possibly a little bit derivative and sometimes seems to be treading water in narrative terms, but only after making us submit to a very woozy and hallucinatory experience.

The scene is a Muslim school for girls in Malaysia whose pupils are required to submit to conservative dress and attitudes; in the English language class, they are presented with sentences such as: “The father goes to work. The mother cooks at home.” Twelve-year-old Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) hangs out with her friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa), and from the very first we see that she is a natural rebel and leader: she is being filmed on someone’s phone in the toilets, dancing and removing her headscarf, a dangerously transgressive act. The teaching staff are highly annoyed at the girls getting up to no good in this semi-private place and the headteacher (Fatimah Abu Bakar) harangues them for their bad attitudes, and laments the fact that Chinese pupils beat the Malaysian in exam results.

The crisis arrives, of course, in a tense moment as Zaffan realises that her body is changing ahead of everyone else. They register her differentness at first as a kind of privilege; she is excused prayers, a development which gradually turns into ostracisation and bullying from her former mate Farah. But wait. Something is indeed happening to Zaffan’s body — an unexpected kind of otherness, rage, cunning and strength. She sees woodland creatures on tree branches who have burning eyes and appears to be transforming into one herself.

This movie’s strength could also be its weakness: the relationship between the metaphorical and the literal. The first time we see Zaffan’s eyes ablaze, the first time we see her body unambiguously and scarily turn into something monstrous, there is a kind of thrill – we have apparently moved into a new dimension of anxiety and even horror. But in the next scene, she is back to normal and there appears to be no narrative consequence to what we have just seen. Of course, these two modes can coexist perfectly well, but the subsidiary issues about mass hysteria and a snake-oil exorcist (Shaheizy Sam) called in to help are undermined a little.

After all, no matter how reactionary and misogyny-complicit the authorities are in their approach to Zaffan, they are not being irrational exactly; she is, after all, becoming am actual monster. Still, the performances the director gets from her young cast are tremendous and it is terrifically shot.

• Tiger Stripes screened at the Cannes film festival.