An unhurried, affectionate, coming-of-age story, Siyou Tan’s “Amoeba” begins in grainy black and white. A young girl, Choo Xin Yu (Ranice Tay), lies silently on her bed, recounting her interactions with a ghost in her room to an unseen friend holding the camcorder. It’s an odd introduction that belies what type of film Tan is making here. Backgrounding the specter of colonial Singapore, Tan focuses on Choo as she returns to her all-girls Chinese school for her final year.
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Rebellious to the type of authoritarian education that the school instills, she quickly falls in with a group of other like-minded girls — Vanessa (Nicole Len Wen), Gina (Genevieve Tan), and Sofia (Shi-An Lim) — all struggling between their impulse to be individuals and the school’s desire for complete conformity. This tension forms the backbone of a film that’s more content to wander through the girl’s final year of school — with a looming final test and, eventually, graduation just in the distance — than it is to stick to a single narrative thread. 
But, more than anything, Tan nails the specifics of this tension with a keen understanding of how teenagers are constantly in motion, looking for something to give their lives meaning. When Choo returns to school, dragging her desk behind her, she is immediately chastised for the length of her skirt and hair. When nominated to be a teacher’s helper, she gives the class a speech denouncing the position as nothing more than being a servant to the teacher. Of course, she wins the election, even though the school says otherwise. 
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Instead, understanding that the rules are stacked against them, Choo and her friends begin hanging out, making silly videos with their camcorder and, mainly, just wandering around with the type of labored boredom that defines so much of youth. They eventually take an interest in Sofia’s father’s friend Phoon (Jack Kao), a former gang member who reluctantly teaches them how to walk and act like they are in one themselves. Being in a gang, however childish, nevertheless gives them a power that their parents or teachers never allow them to have. But in a society so content to stamp out personality, such minor acts of rebellion cause indignation from those in authority.  
Not that this is a plot-heavy movie, anyway. Its structural waywardness mimics the girls, as Tan lingers on singular scenes and moments sometimes without a sense of cohesion. Of course, it’s a hang-out movie, but it also suggests more is at stake for these girls than self-discovery. Even if some of these threads aren’t followed through — Choo’s underdeveloped home life comes to mind here — they nevertheless give “Amoeba” a real texture. Further, the very nature of that teenage discovery is positioned as an act of defiance against the authorities in their lives.
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When that final test arrives, Tan neatly sums up her thematic interests by having Choo note the tension between Singapore’s real and imagined histories. It’s a showy and talkative scene in a film that is otherwise much more lo-fi. The girls’ desire to document their friendship through videos on their camcorder speaks to a latent anxiety that their youth might be erased, as so many other things have been in their lives and city. Tan seems interested in considering what a person or city is without their quirks and personality. While the school predictably wants an entire class of automatons, Choo, Vanessa, Gina, and Sofia’s small resistance undermines its authoritarian rule.
When we finally return to that initial image of Choo alone on her bed, it becomes clear that the ghost isn’t a supernatural presence. Instead, they are in the statues the girls have to clean as punishment and the caves underneath the school that remain locked up, lest someone remember why they were built in the first place. Choo worries that she might become a specter of her old self, her personality crushed out by those around her. It’s a legitimate fear, but also one that, if her final speech is any indication, won’t be coming true anytime soon. [A-]
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