In Tan Siyou’s debut feature Amoeba, teen rebellion at a top Singapore school comes with a price

Amoeba (R21)

98 minutes, opens exclusively at Filmhouse on March 26
★★★★☆

The story: At a Singapore all-girls secondary school noted for its illustrious history and conservative ideas about womanhood, Choo (Ranice Tay) finds herself unable to follow rules about obedience and decorum. Her defiance attracts the attention of like-minded students Vanessa (Nicole Lee), Sofia (Lim Shi-An) and Gina (Genevieve Tan). They form a tight-knit group reflecting their desire to be themselves, rather than who their parents, school and education system want them to be.

Films about the discomforts of life in Singapore could be a genre in itself – the word “Singatrauma” is as good a name for the category as any.

Some are great, others not so much. The difference between them is relatability and authenticity. Does the film make the problem feel real? How much pain feels like clumsy overstatement? Most of all, how much of it is trauma tourism, stories of suffering penned by creators in air-conditioned writing nooks?

Local writer-director Tan Siyou’s debut feature Amoeba is a coming-of-age story loosely based on her experiences in a secondary school known for its Confucian values, so the level of detail – the school uniform checks, the assembly speeches and school songs that extol womanly virtues – is all there, with little of it feeling exaggerated for the sake of making a satirical point.

For a girl who feels like a misfit, life in an elite school feels like a bitter joke. It would have been easy for Tan to make the adults look cartoonishly oppressive, but her light, realistic touch makes the grown-ups look as trapped as the girls.

For the older folk, youthful impulsiveness or artistic exuberance are alien concepts. Inappropriate behaviour is a moral flaw that reflects poorly on parents and the school, so it must be driven out by punishment.

Tan subtly points out the parallels between school and prison – the most conformist girls are rewarded by becoming trustees of the system, a perk that Choo dismisses as not a perk at all, but a burden.

The misfits at the centre of Amoeba are outsiders who view the adult world as a matrix of comforting fairy tales supporting a system that treats its young as factory outputs.

Choo is blessed – some would say cursed – with the ability to see through the charade. Like the main character in a young adult novel, she creates an alternate set of values – friendship, rebellion, adventure – for the quartet. The camera is there as the group’s fifth member. The frisson that results from seeing the bad behaviour is delicious.

Amoeba differs from other critiques of Singapore’s education system, such as Jack Neo’s I Not Stupid films (2002 to 2024), in that it views the story through the eyes of its teenage main characters. That viewpoint contains other aspects of teenhood, such as a romantic awakening, though, in the film, that element is expressed metaphorically.

The actresses, who are in their 20s, are startlingly convincing as teenagers, not just in their youthfulness but also in the way they confidently express the wild emotional swings that come with being young. This story could have been a litany of woe about Singaporean life, but Tan backs up her disgruntlement with insight.

Hot take: An unsentimental coming-of-age film that captures the joy and pain of being a teen misfit, grounded in strong performances and a story relatable to anyone who has been through the Singapore education system.