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Tigertail Movie Review

Tigertail is a 2020 indie drama film directed by Alan Yang and starring Tzi Ma. It’s one of the year’s most intimate, sweetest indies.

By following one Taiwanese man’s immigrant journey in the US and to the extent his entire family throughout decades, this movie is inarguably quite epic in its ambitions and storytelling. My only issue with it is that such a long, all-encompassing storyline should have been given a proper, longer time to develop with ninety minutes simply being too short of a runtime for this particular excursion.

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Still though, Tigertail mostly worked out well despite it being so incredibly short. That’s because the drama is so potent and the movie is quite emotionally investing and even very moving and poignant at times, especially when it comes to the scenes between father and daughter. I personally found that ending to be the movie’s greatest achievement. It was stunningly shot, gorgeously composed and so immensely nostalgic that it ended the film on a suitably touching note.

Tzi Ma is the acting standout in this film. He is an actor who has had many roles throughout the years and here he is stupendous in his every scene. You can feel his sadness and his frustrations while again the father-daughter relationship was in my opinion the heart of the movie as it was very well written and complicated. She is a great character, but I also really liked his former flame played so intriguingly by Joan Chen. Their reconnection at a restaurant was another powerful sequence full of missed opportunities and regret.

So yes, Tigertail is an emotionally complex experience that portrays just how difficult life for immigrants is, but also how strained some of those relationships can become as a result of geographic separations. The direction from Alan Young is excellent and the film is beautifully shot with every single time period having a different color saturation to it. That made the film versatile and lively and also easy to follow. I just wish it was longer and better paced.

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Tigertail is an overly short film as ninety minutes was simply not enough to tell this epic storyline encompassing an entire generation’s timeline. Still, the movie works because it is so well acted with Tzi Ma’s central performance being a standout and because it’s gorgeously shot with every period having a different color to it. The movie is also quite poignant and at the end even touching.

My Rating – 4