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    ‘Tiger Stripes’ Review: A Ferocious Change

    Myth and the changes of puberty combine in Amanda Nell Eu’s fierce, funny debut feature.Decades of storytellers have framed changes in the adolescent female body as somehow mysterious and dangerous, almost sorcery. That’s why horror films like “Carrie,” “The Witch,” “The Exorcist” and “Teeth” are so spine-chilling. The theme is so well-trodden that it’s a little hard to find a fresh spin on the subject. In her feature debut “Tiger Stripes,” the director Amanda Nell Eu pulls it off.Eu’s film is set in her native Malaysia, and centers on Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), a vivacious 11-year-old whose world revolves around her best friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa). Together they film TikTok dances, play in the river on the way home from school, plaster stickers everywhere and talk about bras. They pretend to be kittens and they have a club for the three of them. They are, in other words, typical tweens.Then one day, Zaffan discovers she’s begun menstruating, and overnight her life changes. In her strict religious school, she doesn’t attend prayers while on her period. Her friends suddenly see her as unclean, dirty, an outsider. They gang up on her. They call her names. And strange things start to happen to Zaffan’s body and mind, including the lingering presence of a red-eyed woman in a tree that only she seems to be able to see.“Tiger Stripes” literalizes some of the potential side effects of menstruation — mood changes, cramps, body dysmorphia and more — but it also heads in a more fanciful direction, with the idea of a stalking tiger lurking around the edges of Zaffan’s consciousness.In her village, a tiger is a figure of curiosity, with everyone wanting to look at it and film it, and a source of danger, a powerful being that can hurt you if it chooses. Zaffan begins to feel that’s what she has become; no longer is she the little girl who sometimes misbehaves but mostly follows the rules. She has stepped beyond their reach, and deserves her own kind of freedom.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More