Shirkers (2018): Netflix Documentary Review

Shirkers, the 2018 film directed by Sandi Tan, was recently uploaded to Netflix. 

Sandi Tan in Shirkers

I'd be one of the first to state that documentaries are not usually something which I choose to watch unprompted, despite often finding the featured topic interesting. The reason is mainly because I have a notoriously bad attention span when it comes to watching movies in my own home, and I find the standard documentary format - with it's grainy footage and talking heads - only exacerbates this. 

Shirkers, however, doesn’t really conform to the standard documentary format. 

The overall aesthetic of the film is created through a culmination of various mediums. Tan has gathered handwritten letters, old film reels, tape recordings, photographs and current interviews all together throughout the film run time. This unique blend of stylistic devices creates a visually appealing story, one which is rather unique to the documentary film format. In a way, it's almost more remniscent of a YouTube video essay - rather than a standard feature release.

The premise of Shirkers is an also something which is unusual for a documentary format. Documentaries normally feature serious topics, such as true crime or historical events, and, while Shirkers is an exploration of the past, it is a very different kind of past. Shirkers is an exploration of the past of a nineteen-year-old girl. Specifically, the nineteen-year-old girl of Tan’s own, personal past. 

The constantly changing background and colour scheme throughout Shirkers gives the film a wild, off the wall feeling. The sheer amalgamation of things happening on the screen at any given moment reminded me, oddly, of Oliver Stone’s 1994 Natural Born Killers. 

However, while Oliver Stone stated in an interview that Natural Born Killers was the sort of movie which, “You either love or you hate,” watching the nostalgic simplicity of Tan's Shirkers doesn’t quite evoke the same polarising response. 

Shirkers is, at its core, a very simple movie: it explores the making of the movie that Tan and her two friends wrote, directed, and starred in when they were teenagers living in Singapore. The film was a passion project from the three girls. 

However, during the production, their film teacher, an adult man called Georges, stole the film from them. Without the film reels, Tan and her friends weren’t able to view what they had created for twenty years. Shirkers lay dead, until the death of Georges himself finally saw the film returned to Tan. 

Thus, Shirkers is in many ways, a piece of mourning. It’s a final goodbye to something that was never given its true chance at life. Tan explores the weight of the film she lost, the way it affected her relationships with her friends, and the way it affected her own career moving forwards. 

However, Shirkers isn’t only negative, and it isn’t weighed down with the weight of what Georges took from them. 

Shirkers is, first and foremost, an exploration of youth, an acknowledgement of friendship. The relationship between Tan and her friends is still strong, and their presence in the film allows everything to breathe freely. The film is feminist without pushing it, punk without declaring it. It’s a rare breath of fresh air in a genre which is all too often only doom and gloom.