15

Royston Tan’s unflinching portrait of lost youths: cutting classes, getting into bloody fights, taking drugs, smuggling drugs, prostituting themselves. Tan doesn’t judge but invites us into their world. This is their Singapore, one in which the Merlion spews forth an endless stream of bile and the merits of architecture are based on the criterion of suitability for suicide.

Despite the sombre subject matter, the film’s aural and visual inventiveness relieves some of the oppressiveness. The secret society chants set to techno beats kick gangsta rap’s ass. Good thing there were subtitles though or I would have been totally lost. In a scene on a bus, Tan presents us with a visual metaphor for the boys’ emotional state. You realise, after a while, that the scene is unfolding in rewind mode, but forwards, backwards, there’s little discernible difference. That’s how trapped they feel.

There seems to be a lot of crying for a film about gangsters, and then it hits you that these kids are just 15. It’s not quite clear how they ended up on such a desperate path, though broken families and familial violence are referred to. These kids feel so hopeless and alone that they cling onto each other with a fierce desperation. Before they were ostracised because of their tattoos and piercings, were they already marginalised because of their family backgrounds, which were broken, violent and drenched in verbal abuse? Can anything be done for them? The bleak end titles suggest not.