Raindrops on Roses (Part Twenty-Five): Tigers Are Not Afraid

(trailer)

Like I said last week, this was supposed to be where I talked about Robert Eggers’ new movie, The Lighthouse, but I messed up the dates -- it comes out this weekend -- so instead let’s take a look at a different movie that came out this year (in English-speaking countries, at least), Tigers Are Not Afraid, or Vuelven, directed by Issa Lopez. And while we’re still on the theme of “reflections,” we may as well start drawing comparisons to a similar magical realism movie with horror elements, Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

To be fair, the movie kind of invited the comparisons itself by having a quote from Del Toro in its trailer. Besides, if you were going to invite comparisons, you could do worse than a movie like Pan’s Labyrinth. But let’s start with the differences, first.

Tigers sets itself in the modern day, with its magical elements coming from the three pieces of chalk the main character, Estrella, comes into possession of. Each piece of chalk represents a wish that she can make, but she quickly learns that what she says and what she wishes to happen are never quite the same thing.

Also different are the child characters aside from the protagonist. Pan’s Labyrinth intentionally only had one child character (the baby doesn’t count), portraying its Spanish Civil War setting through the eyes of a child who could not be more isolated. Tigers Are Not Afraid, meanwhile, has four other children supporting Estrella as she tries to cope with the world around her. It’s a different dynamic; it promotes a sense of group unity that Labyrinth lacked.

What Tigers Are Not Afraid keeps, though, are a lot of the things that made Pan’s Labyrinth so strong of a movie. Magical realism stories like these are traditionally Hispanic/Latin American, and without meaning to say the originals do it better, these movies replicate those same sorts of feelings. The way the movie plays out, it’s plausible that the chalk simply had no effect at all, and that Estrella’s experiences with the supernatural were simply hallucinations, possibly as a result of trauma.

On top of this, Tigers also has to keep one final story plate spinning: its own nested story about a prince and a tiger, using it as an allegory for everything that’s happening. And again, it’s rather effective, and the two combine at the end for a final sequence.

The only reason this movie might be a difficult recommend (provided you’re not a heathen and deathly opposed to reading subtitles) is that it’s currently only on a fairly niche streaming service, the horror-focused Shudder. But if you do already have it or you otherwise have access to it, this should be on your list.

-F

Next time: Something different…