05/09/2024 - VENICE 2024: Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s thriller finds a couple grieving after their daughter goes missing, with the country’s culture of mass surveillance holding the answer to the mystery

If Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes [+see also:
trailer
film profile] were akin to a piece of clothing, it would be a woollen jumper, but not one recently store-bought: it’s more the falling-apart, long-owned kind, with several loose fibres from collar to hem languishing, just begging to be tugged. To continue this analogy, the key threads would correspond to each principal character, and Yeo’s film makes full use of two hours following each one’s wayward, extended path, until it unravels in a large tangle in your hands. More successful as a character study and a portrait of group psychology than as a conventional thriller, Yeo’s follow-up to his Locarno Golden Leopard-winning A Land Imagined [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] has screened as one of the last competition titles at this year’s Venice Film Festival.

Bringing to mind recent arthouse-suspense touchstones such as Michael Haneke’s Hidden [+see also:
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interview: Margaret Menegoz
interview: Michael Haneke
film profile] and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Andrey Zvyagintsev
film profile], Yeo devises a stock thriller set-up, where the young girl of an ordinary married couple, Junyang (Wu Chien-Ho) and Peiying (Annica Panna), is abducted whilst at a local playground, and a sensitive but hard-bitten cop, Officer Zheng (Pete Teo), offers patient and pragmatic advice. With the screenplay then unveiling a chaptered, multi-perspective structure, learning that the initial moment of grief has more complicating layers is unsurprising, but its narrative point of view rewardingly shifts across different modes of watching and spying on others, from mass surveillance, through amateur sleuthing, to disturbing voyeurism.

With Wu (East Asian cinema axiom Lee Kang-Sheng), a lonely convenience store manager, completing a central trio of deeply unhappy Singaporeans, Yeo’s actual thematic concerns become more apparent. Viewed merely in plot-driven terms, the film is laborious and unrealistic – and maybe offensive and fantastical when considering the likely motivation for child abduction. Yet the pristine and angular cinematic environment that the director constructs – laden with screens upon screens, criss-crossing phone signals and diagonal concrete stairways leading nowhere in particular – alights on a human truth: when we’re lonely or isolated, we’re liable to project fictions upon people we don’t fully understand, or even complete strangers. Each of the three characters – most notably as Wu realises Peiying is a DJ with a decent following on a Twitch-style live-streaming platform, whereupon he reacts with record-setting levels of creepiness – investigates and uncovers secrets about the others, getting them no closer to the truth about the couple’s daughter, but creating a revelation whereby following and stalking others leads them right back, more informed, to the point of origin: themselves.

Junyang and Peiying are an archetypal young married couple of Singapore’s aspirant classes, first absorbing the optimism of the country’s buoyant economy, then finding their lives boxed in with a child that weighs their aspirations down, tying them unwillingly to conventional gender roles (as a detail we learn later about Junyang strongly underlines). Another surveillance perspective is a less screen-mediated one: a classic Rear Window panorama of an identical family apartment block, built parallel to the main protagonists’ own. Maybe this fear, this sensitisation towards watching from Yeo – who, born in 1985, is very much a millennial filmmaker in his timely concerns – is as paranoid as his characters, yet the erosion of many forms of privacy, a key feature of our age, is refracted here with crystalline clarity.

Stranger Eyes is a co-production of Singapore, Taiwan, France and the USA, staged by Akanga Film Asia, Volos Films, Films de Force Majeure and Cinema Inutile. Its international sales are overseen by Playtime.