“I wonder if it’s like being inside an aquarium,” remarks sixteen-year-old Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay) as she sits for her Ordinary Level examinations. Facing the examiner, and with a picture of Singapore’s central business district on her desk, she appraises the future laid out before her: the mythical Merlion, a lion’s head atop a piscine body, bestrides the frame, its repose inscrutable. An invention by a British ichthyologist to boost tourist numbers, the Merlion stands tall and proud as the country’s mascot, a silent spokesperson for happiness, prosperity, and progress; at least, this is what Choo’s friends recite to the examiner, what they’re ostensibly expected to do. But something within her resists doing the same. It’s a rebellious streak, to be sure, with her face caught between a scowl and a sneer. It’s also something less recognizable, even to herself, when she catches herself pouring her heart out in a moment of brief catharsis she knows won’t lead anywhere.
Such is the penultimate sequence of Amoeba, Siyou Tan’s perceptive feature debut about the quest for girlhood in Singapore, that it brings into focus the latent frustrations and impulses underlying much of the film. When Choo, maladjusted to the harsh strictures of her all-girls secondary school, is placed into a new class, she finds kindred company in a trio of similarly insubordinate teens who fall for her publicly insouciant attitude. With Vanessa (Nicole Lee Wen), Sofia (Lim Shi-An), and Gina (Genevieve Tan) she obtains some respite from her stern teachers, who peddle Confucian truisms and punish the slightest clothing infraction; when Sofia takes them all to meet her family driver, Phoon (Jack Kao), he playfully suggests that they form a gang to consecrate their friendship. How different, after all, are the gangster’s tenets of loyalty and brotherhood from those of “excellence, duty, and honor” sermonized by the school?
This question nonetheless articulates the thorny phenomenon, so central to Amoeba, of a generation of youth grappling with who they are. Gone are the days of rampant hooliganism, and the film’s representations of contemporary middle-class Singapore are worlds away from the unruly reality of juvenile delinquents in Royston Tan’s seminal gangster movie 15 (2003). Where Choo and her friends are concerned, rule-breaking and acting out are meek attempts to clear the stifling air — exacerbated by an institutionalized conformity muting creative expression and constraining individuality. And though the rituals of teenage sisterhood and camaraderie constitute a pretend play the girls will inevitably outgrow, they are to them necessary delusions, part and parcel of formative selfhood: growing up, falling in love, falling out of love, and growing up some more.
Amoeba’s sensitive portrait of a restless coming of age renders its characters with no little verisimilitude, but its realist strokes, intriguingly, are bookended by a foray into the supernatural. Confiding in her friends about a ghost haunting her bedroom, Choo borrows a camcorder from Sofia to catch it on film; the elusive presence, however, unwittingly brings to the surface other undercurrents not mentioned, much less tolerated, by the prim and polite society around her. Though Tan has clarified the literalness of her ghost, the latter’s symbolic import as a return of the repressed isn’t precluded amid the violently practical order of the day. What cannot be seen is not real, just as what isn’t acknowledged cannot pose a threat. Desire, queer or otherwise, circumscribes itself within a layered and hierarchical nexus of race, class, and gender; to act otherwise — in short, not as the model Chinese daughters of an elite workforce — would be to fail the system and, as one teacher decries, become “ungovernable.”
Yet the absence of government is neither palpably apparent nor wholly liberating for the girls, who swear an oath, get into trouble, and end up in the same exam room, waiting to close a chapter in their lives. The paradox at the heart of Amoeba lies in its shape-shifting titular metaphor: an island of the individual, a tabula rasa in search of the external world. Both fiercely independent and craving an identity wrought in the shadow of others, Choo, Vanessa, Sofia, and Gina cosplay as swaggering cool kids, a twinge of self-awareness burrowed into their happy naïveté. They question authority, doubt history, and challenge the sanitized narratives of life and success as are fed them. They wonder to themselves whether sincerity alone can cut it with the powers that be. Retreating into a cave beside their school, they purge themselves of the codes of conduct, if only fleetingly, and enact new ones among the soon-to-be-excavated relics of a previous century. “Emptiness is the body,” intones Choo in labored, visceral prayer, keen to exorcise the ghost in her room. With an intensely personal eye, Amoeba composes out of this emptiness a defiant and staggeringly vulnerable tale of adolescence found, lost, and regained once more.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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