Seeing is not always believing in Stranger Eyes, the first Singaporean feature ever to score a main competition slot at Venice Film Festival. Beginning as a suspense-driven kidnap thriller, writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s third full-length work gradually builds into a more complex philosophical rumination on voyeurism, alienation and disconnection in an age of digital mass surveillance.
There are stylistic and thematic echoes here of some vintage screen classics, from Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) to Michael Haneke’s Hidden (2005), with an added frisson of culturally specific paranoia about Singapore becoming a lightly dystopian police state. Atmospheric and twist-heavy, this solidly crafted nerve-jangler should travel widely after Venice, its prospects boosted by genre-adjacent crime-thriller trappings. Yeo’s previous feature, A Land Imagined (2018), earned the top prize in Locarno and sold to Netflix.
Fittingly, we first see twentysomething couple Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Annica Panna) on a scratchy home video clip, playing with their baby daughter Little Bo on a carefree family picnic, with Junyang’s elegant fortysomething mother Shuping (Vera Chen) behind the camera. Peiying’s top is emblazoned with the slogan “I’m Watching You”, an incidental detail that takes on a more sinister resonance as events unfold.
Jumping forward in time, we find the couple now drained and devastated. Months before this scene, Little Bo was abducted from a playground by an unseen kidnapper while Junyang was distracted by his phone. The bereft parents are now poring over old footage, desperately seeking clues that will help them find the culprit. When they ask neighbours for help, they mostly encounter compassion fatigue and suspicion. “Even kindness has an expiry date,” Peiying observes bitterly.
Out of the blue, an unsettling series of DVDs begin arriving at the apartment that the couple share with Shupin, slipped under the door by an unseen stranger. The discs contain video footage of the couple going back years, obsessively filmed by their stalker, including close-up material shot on the day that Bo was abducted. Sensing a breakthrough in the case, gruff detective Zheng (Pete Teo) has a camera fitted outside the apartment. The culprit is soon arrested: Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), an impassive, sullen, middle-aged supermarket manager living in the residential block opposite, where he shares an apartment with his elderly mother.
A more conventional crime thriller would have concluded with this unmasking, but Yeo is clearly playing a more subtle game of bait and switch here. His non-linear narrative shifts midway through to Lao Wu’s viewpoint, tracking his long history of video-stalking Peiying and Junyang, an obsession seemingly piqued by irritation over their self-absorbed lifestyles and careless disregard for Little Bo. His private investigations expose some uncomfortable home truths for the pair, notably Junyang’s serial flirtation and infidelity, which extends to bisexual threesomes. Meanwhile, when the police find no evidence that Lao Wu abducted Bo, they reluctantly set him free. A devastated Peiying resorts to desperate measures, exploiting her neighbour’s creepy fixation on her hobby as an online techno DJ, setting a trap that begins with sexual temptation and ends in violence.
Spoiler alert: the red-herring kidnap plot that initially drives Stranger Eyes is eventually resolved, by which point it has become incidental to the emotional and mental havoc it has wrought ion the film’s protagonists. Yeo is far more interested in questions of voyeurism and privacy, the deep human need to feel seen, the alienating effect of technology and the dangerous power of secrets. One of his most striking motifs is the forest of cameras spread across every corner of Singapore, a blanket surveillance culture where everything is visible but darker undercurrents go unseen. Seeing too much, knowing too much about friends, lovers and family members is not always a healthy way to live. Humankind cannot bear too much reality.
Stranger Eyes meanders a little in its overlong final act, circling around a psychological “explanation” for Lau Wu’s obsessive stalking that feels strained and simplistic. More investigation of the thinly drawn Junyang and Peiying, their thwarted desires and secret ambitions, might have helped deepen the psychodrama and smooth some of the film’s more jarring plot twists. Yeo Siew Hua’s cautionary message about surveillance technology is also a little opaque, notionally critical but lacking any deeper sociopolitical analysis.
But despite a few clumsy touches and offbeat choices, Stranger Eyes is a satisfying and classy piece of work overall, throbbing with slow-burn dread and digital paranoia. Yeo’s use of CCTV, low-res video footage and vast mosaics of surveillance screens underscores a strong aesthetic package. Likewise his spare but striking deployment of diegetic music, from thumping techno beats to haunting romantic ballads.
Director, screenwriter: Yeo Siew Hua
Cast: Wu Chien-ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-yew
Cinematography: Hideho Urata
Editing: Jean-Christophe Bouzy
Music: Thomas Foguenne
Producers: Fran Borgia, Stefano Centini, Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Alex C. Lo
Production companies: Akanga Film Asia (Singapore), Volos Films (Taiwan), Films de Force Majeure (France), Cinema Inutile (US)
World sales: Playtime, Paris
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
In Mandarin, English
125 minutes
