Stone Turtle: a Malaysian Groundhog Day folk tale

• Reviewed at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.

If the events of Groundhog Day took place on a near-uninhabited Malaysian island and dealt in vengeance rather than romance, and if it featured rather more stonings, drownings, burnings and deaths-by-spiny-sea-creature than would have been appropriate for a 1993 Harold Ramis comedy, it might look a little like Woo Ming Jin’s Stone Turtle. As bizarre as that mash-up may sound, it’s only the beginning of this ambitious narrative, which doesn’t so much meld the prosaic and the poetic as pole-vault erratically between them. The real-world and fantastical elements never quite cohere – and indeed sometimes actively undercut each other – but the result, while messy, is never less than engaging, especially for anyone seeking instruction in the surprisingly many ways a sea urchin can be wielded as a murder weapon.

Premiering in competition in the Locarno Film Festival, Woo’s film, which he co-wrote with Deo Mahameru and Neesa Jamal, is the peculiar result of a somewhat literal filmmaking style being applied to a story that is anything but. Certainly, the arresting opening is a short, sharp yank of the rug. On a stretch of stony coastline, its prettiness almost incidental to DoP Kong Pahurak’s dramatic, alert camerawork, a young woman wordlessly leaves her little daughter in the care of the woman’s sister, then goes with downcast eyes to sit with her parents. She kneels dutifully, and pours them all some tea. Then her father stands and, with casual barbarity, brings a large rock repeatedly down on her head.

Looking on in horror at this ‘honour killing’, the sister, Zahara (Asmara Abigail), shields the eyes of her niece Nika and draws her away from the bloody scene. But its after-effects will be felt for the rest of their lives, and possibly, as the story’s many ghosts suggest, beyond. Several years later, Zahara and the now ten-year-old Nika (Samara Kenzo) are living undocumented on a tiny island where Zahara scrapes a living in the illegal turtle egg trade. Zahara is determined to enrol Nika in a mainland school and canoes her way there, but is met with constant stonewalling by the bureaucrat in charge. “I didn’t know people lived there,” he sniffs disdainfully, when Zahara gives him their address. Nika’s school application is denied.

On their return to the island, with Nika clutching an incongruous Ms. Marvel comic purloined from the waiting room (not even the remotest Malay Peninsula islands remain untouched by the Marvel Universe, it seems), there is an unexpected visitor. Samad (Bront Palarae) claims to be researching the endangered leatherback turtle, but the strange uneasiness that exists between him and Zahara indicates otherwise. Sure enough, Zahara’s hostility towards him culminates in an initially inexplicable act of entrapment – after which, jarringly, Zahara awakens groggily in the canoe en route to the mainland again, and the day of the school application repeats itself. Zahara moves through it in a daze of déjà vu, until Samad’s arrival unleashes her desire for feminist vengeance once more, which leads to a marginally different but still violent and tragic denouement before the day once again resets.

Despite the circularity of this construction, the repeated day recurring with minor and then major variations, the approach is oddly linear; its layers are unpacked and laid end-to-end. Aside from the spooky edge to Phil Chapavich’s spartan score, the film feels slightly lacking in texture and atmospherics. Even its most phantasmagorical sections, such as Zahara enacting a strange Wicker Man-esque ritual, or the beachside showdown between Zahara and Samad with their gender-coded allies (the spirits of wronged women for Zahara; a small gang of henchmen dressed like Mormons for Samad) are played with the same matter-of-fact normality as, say, the dully banal interactions with the government official. But even without much in the way of subtext, the energy given off by the film’s bold engagement with its broad themes of violent patriarchal oppression, tradition colliding with modernity, and ancient folkloric traditions crossbreeding with newer storytelling forms keeps Stone Turtle compelling even when it fails to convince.

One of the more successful flourishes is an animated section in which the myth of the eponymous stone turtle – an old Malaysian folk tale – is rendered in a naïve but beguiling picture-book style. Quite what this melancholic love story has to do with the overarching narrative of uncompromising female rage is anyone’s guess. But perhaps it is simply the sobering observation that whether it’s the release of a lover from his mystical stone enchantment or a seal of approval finally stamped on a government form, for some women it can take a lifetime of struggle, sacrifice and self-abnegation to effect even the tiniest act of liberation.