In the manner in which director Siyou Tan and her DoP Neus Ollé shoot it in Amoeba [+lee también:
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ficha de la película], the modern secondary-school experience has never looked so visually eerie. Wherever you attended high school, or from its typical depictions especially in US cinema, it might’ve been occasionally harrowing, but never quite so dystopian and alienating as the filmmakers capture it here, with the endless hallways stretching out into forever, all painted in an institutional white design. The opposing life force is found in its lead character, Choo (Ranice Tay), and the solidarity and comradeship she finds in three close friends in her class. Premiering last week in Toronto’s Discovery strand, it’s another broadcast from a Singaporean filmmaker – following Yeo Siew Hua and Anthony Chen’s work – indicating that something is very ill at ease in that island city-state.

East Asian art films, especially those from mainland China, tend to pivot on the discovery of history, or historicising the present; in Amoeba, Singapore seems intent on erasing any traces of its past, with the built environment of glass skyscrapers and homogenous residential buildings also symbolising this. From the country’s high-performing economy on down, schools like the film’s elite Confucian Girls’ Secondary School are veritable factories to produce its next generation of civil servants and technocrats. When Choo steps into her first day in class 4.10 (even the numeric “name” is ominous), she’s immediately admonished for her hair almost touching her neck; then she’s forced to run in a student representative election, where her sharp criticisms of the school’s culture of authority force the organisers to rig the results. But despite the screenplay’s direct inspiration from Tan’s own teenage years, with all the estrangement and isolation she felt, the bold visual stylisation and the hyperbolised depiction of school discipline still seem overemphatic.

Rather than a band of punks or slackers revelling in their non-conformism, Choo and her three main friends Sofia (Lim Shi-An), Vanessa (Nicole Lee Wen) and Gina (Genevieve Tan) are easily the most intelligent in their class, which in this school ecosystem naturally makes them outlaws. The spotlessly clean digital cinematography and the architecture all suggest the 2020s, but their use of a consumer camcorder to record themselves and their hijinks – and Tan’s own age – makes Amoeba feel like just the latest 2000s period piece; indeed, the constant transitions to compressed SD footage, in a narrow aspect ratio, also give it a kinship to this year’s Romería [+lee también:
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entrevista: Carla Simón
ficha de la película], which has a similar motif. Maybe for this generation, artefact-ridden pixelation is the language of their memories. These are well-off kids, so Sofia has her own personal driver: her uncle Phoon (Jack Kao), whose tales of his old Singapore gang life inspire the girls to film themselves performing a song associated with that culture. Suspicious of their attachment to the camcorder, the teachers eventually confiscate it, and the outcome for the friends is severe.

Nevertheless, an odd flaw of Amoeba is its rhetorical forcefulness: the film asserts its thesis so insistently that there’s no breathing room between the various scenes and their underlying meaning. It’s not that particular characterisations or the group dynamic don’t register; instead, the sociopolitical context takes precedence over the content, becoming our primary consideration as the film draws to a close. Still, Amoeba will especially resonate at home, and in the wider region, for its articulate anger.

Amoeba is a production by Singapore, the Netherlands, France, Spain and South Korea, staged by Akanga Film Asia, Volya Films, Les Films d’Antoine, Mararía Films and Widelog Office. Its world sales are overseen by Diversion.