Tigers Are Not Afraid Is a Grim Urban Fantasy

Though the protagonists of Tigers Are Not Afraid (now streaming on Shudder) are all young children, they are not shielded from the horrors of the world. The Mexican students soon turn to orphans in the slums when the violence and kidnapping by cartels force them into the streets; some retreat into fantasy through the magical tales they once heard in school, but they cannot fully escape. There simply isn’t anything more terrifying in their minds than adults with guns hunting them down. This is a film not afraid to focus on the darker aspects while still carrying a fantastical edge so faint that any moment a dabble of fantasy smears across the screen, it’s a breath of minor relief.

Estrella (Paola Lara) has some help from a living plush tiger. Courtesy of Shudder

The film begins with Estrella (Paola Lara) dreaming of fairy tales, only to have that creative experience shattered when gunfire breaks out at her school. The teacher tries to keep her calm during the dangerous situation, granting her chalk she speaks of allowing wishes to be granted. Despite this attempt to take Estrella’s mind off the violence, however, she’ll still have to spot a dead body in the streets on her walk home. The despair follows her when she returns to an empty household with her mother missing. She uses one of her wishes in hopes of bringing her mother back, but it doesn’t quite work—not the way she thinks it should, at least.

Parentless and seeking answers, Estrella takes to the gritty streets, where she befriends a collective of orphans led by Shine (Juan Ramón López), but she’s not accepted openly. She’s told that to be inducted, she must commit an act worthy of a gangster of the streets, namely killing a member of a cartel that is kidnapping children.

The street orphans mark a wall with a tiger. Image courtesy of Shudder.

Estrella, we discover, possesses a strange power to both call on dark forces to act for her and also communicate with the dead. But though those these powers help her, they do not make her invincible against the very real and dangerous cartels around her. With one of the children being witness to a crime, they all become targets of gun-toting gangsters who won’t hesitate in the slightest to shoot anyone, even a kid. Knowing this leads to many unexpected and tragic moments as the children struggle to survive on the streets, narrowly avoiding being kidnapped and swiping just enough food to survive. They have to become their own parents, instructing the smaller ones to eat the dried vegetables in the instant ramen as that’s their only means of nutrition.

There’s no sense of relief from the bitterness of evil adults in this world. With all of Estrella’s powers, she still feels helpless; her ability to contact the dead only makes the sting that much harder when she has to speak with one of her peers crossing over to the other side. Even more frightening are her talks with the more adult and decaying dead with much unrest for the injustice of the world. The grown-up world just seems to be a depressing mess either not worth pursuing or in desperate need of some righting of the wrong.

The children spend a lazy afternoon in an abandoned building. Courtesy of Shudder

Tigers Are Not Afraid has a bittersweet ambiguous ending that signals a certain need to strike out and make the world a better place. There comes an age when the growing youth becomes bitter and views reality through different eyes, when fairy tales are mere distractions from the horrors of life. This film suggests that such stories still hold an allure to today’s chaotic landscape, fitting with the grim tones of many classic stories. Sometimes fairy tales are seen as an escape from reality, and sometimes they’re guidance for the reality we desire. We can only hope we never grow cynical enough to let them fade.