Movie Review: 'Tyger Tyger'

The new movie Tyger Tyger suffers from the strange affliction of having a far more interesting backstory than the story being told in the movie. The film was written and directed by Kerry Mondragon and explores his own troubled history with drug abuse to tell a story about the often surreal, beautiful and dangerous world of addiction. The film is set inside a real life fringe community in California that proves to be way more interesting than the story of the movie.

Tyger Tyger stars Sam Quartin as Blake, a woman who is working as a drug mule for a clinic that is trying to get needed pandemic drugs into a fringe community called The Slabs. Her aims are pure but when we meet her, she and her boyfriend, played by Max Madsen, are among a group of masked criminals who are robbing a pharmacy. Here, Blake meets and connects with Luke (Dylan Sprouse), a heroin addict waiting for a methadone prescription that he’s not getting.

Blake and her boyfriend briefly take Luke hostage and as part of their escape plan, Blake takes Luke’s clothes, including his lucky tiger shirt. This should be the last time they see each other but Blake feels bad for keeping Luke from getting his medication so she tracks him down and tries to give it to him out of the stash she helped steal. This somehow leads to Blake’s best friend, a mute girl named Emerald (Thea Sophie Loch Naess), taking Luke hostage again, throwing him in their trunk and taking him with them on their trip to The Slabs.

The Slabs or Slab City is a real place. It’s been covered by Vice, the Smithsonian Magazine and has its own Wikipedia page. It’s viewed by many as the last free place in America. Others view it as a haven for drugs and criminals hiding from the law. It’s a community of people living entirely off the grid with no electricity, no running water and a lore all its own. It gained popularity in the 1980s among a group of R.V owning survivalists and has grown to unexpected degrees over the years as a self-sustained community in the desert.

That backstory is way more interesting than the story being told in Tyger Tyger. Director Kerry Mondragon isn’t telling a conventional story but even the modest romance of Blake and Luke and Mondragon’s artful delivery of their story can’t live up to the colorful backdrop and the strange denizens of Slab City who Mondragon hired as extras and experts. Residents of The Slabs provided set design tips and advised on wardrobe choices along with lending their weird energy to the movie.

Several sequences in the movie are shot documentary style, guerilla filmmaking, where the actors are guided through the scene by residents of The Slabs. This stylistic choice only serves to make life of The Slab more interesting than the makeshift characters of Tyger Tyger who amount cardboard cutouts of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz or yet another modern retelling of Alice in Wonderland where the wonderland is made of sex and drugs.

That’s not to say that Tyger Tyger is without its merits. I find actress Sam Quentin to be very interesting. She doesn’t have the affectation of an actress, she appears to embrace the oddity of the movie very well and doesn’t get bogged down by the lack of narrative progress that takes place in Tyger Tyger. Her performance is all in spirit and energy because what little story there is in Tyger Tyger is only just enough to get the characters to this colorful location and then allow this location to dictate the story.

Of course, much of the attention garnered for Tyger Tyger will center on former Full House baby turned Disney channel star, Cole Sprouse, playing a heroin addict. Sprouse isn’t a bad actor and is not dreadfully bad in Tyger Tyger but he’s ill suited for the stultifying arty approach of director Kerry Mondragon. Sprouse sticks out as the character who is most in search of a traditional narrative and as the one least capable of settling in and allowing the artful direction to carry him around.

Kerry Mondragon has a lovely eye for visuals, a strong sense of the art of filmed image but he appears to lack the discipline yet to combine that artful eye with a credible, recognizable narrative. The story of Tyger Tyger borders on incomprehensible when there is a story being told at all. The scraps of a story we do get hamper the more atmospheric, tonal art movie that Tyger Tyger wants to be.

I am reminded a little of Roger Corman and Peter Fonda’s 1967 movie The Trip. They wanted to show the squares what being on LSD was like and it came off like a long meandering anecdote from a friend that ends with him saying ‘I guess you had to be there.’ Tyger Tyger doesn’t linger or feel overly long but there are meandering scenes and go nowhere scenes that do test your patience as the director tries to show you what the life of a heroin addict is kind of like.

Mondragon then tries to pull the rug out from under you with a twist and it just feels forced. The ending arrives as if the director wasn’t satisfied with the ending he had and decided to liven things up with a twist. Oddly enough, the twist is perhaps the most conventional thing in the entire movie, a dollop of mainstream Hollywood amidst the punk rock chaos of a heroin inspired art project set in the desert and off the grid.

Tyger Tyger is in some theaters nationwide and is available for streaming rental on February 26th.