What it means to see and be seen within an era of mass surveillance is the slippery subject of Yeo Siew Hua’s “Stranger Eyes” — the first film from Singapore to compete for the Golden Lion in Venice Film Festival’s 81 year history. What begins as a crime thriller ends as a transfixing meditation on our personal need for recognition and the difficulty of finding this for ourselves or providing that for others.
The film begins with a man poring over video footage of a family picnic, looking for clues to the whereabouts of his kidnapped baby. The film ends with him standing outside an apartment looking up at the unit where he no longer belongs. How he moves from dealing with loss to being the lost one is chronicled using an elliptical visual language that takes its cue from security footage tapes. In theory, this provides almost total coverage, yet it does so without ever closing in on its human subjects in all their existential mystery and misery.
Junyang (Wu Chien-Ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) are beside themselves after the disappearance of their baby. This young couple lives with his mother in a tower block which provides “Rear Window”-esque opportunities for spying on the neighbors. Adding to the sense of paranoia is the fact that Peiying has a stalker prone to sending secret recordings of her or them — it seems like someone interpreted Michel Haneke’s “Cache” as an instructional video.These recordings prove rather useful and the police take a special interest in them as a source of potential information as to the whereabouts of the missing baby.
The first act is slow and opaque. It isn’t until a sudden POV switch that aligns us to the stalker that the film really gets going. This stalker is a security guard, a professional in the art of paying close attention. His sweetly composed features do not convey threat so much as paternal care in the subject of his obsession. So far, so “One Hour Photo.” The real subversion is the revelation that Peiying is taking solace from his scrutiny.
As we follow the stalker as he follows the philandering Junyang, it’s clear that discord was a feature of the focal relationship from long before the baby went missing. In the absence of being perceived from more conventional quarters, Peiying is willing to accept what she can get. There is an eerie neo-noir quality to her relationship with her stalker in which the un-boundaried seam where their intimacy is situated could turn into total degradation at any moment.
Yeo does exceptional work at blending different types of footage together to create a visual patchwork that is at once intentionally jarring and strangely smooth. He finds subtle comedy by portraying the attention abyss that jumps up when we are absorbed by our phones. The security guard conducts a job interview while fully committed to a text back-and-forth with Peiying. The notification tones are on and bing-bing-bing interrupts every answer given by an interviewee who knows better than to protest. An ambient sound design by Tu Duu-Chih and Tu Tse Kang feels like a discordant electronic heartbeat that holds space for diegetic additions from the devices that the characters use.
Where so many directors fall back on the clumsy and dutiful inclusion of technology in their films, Yeo succeeds at crafting an original vision, building a film that is part-man, part machine. Some of his best sequences patiently let a digital feed play out and then show us the person watching behind a screen. Peiying livestreams a DJ set where she is dressed as a rave Santa beheld, of course, by a stalker who watches her both through the livestream and through a window. There is never any collapsing into conventional emotional displays. Peiying does not freak out as the stalker texts her, accepting his gaze as a more intense variation of the one she is enabling through her livestream.
During one desperate moment, Peiying asks Junyang if their baby was taken because they did not love her enough. “Stranger Eyes” does not seek to reassure us that she is wrong. In fact, it posits that she could be right. In a later scene, Junyang pores over the stalker’s footage of himself in a playground. Rather than watching his baby, he is distracted by his phone. Can we love the ones we’re with in such conditions of inattention?
The film’s cool response to Peiying’s desperate question is also a result of a visual language that refuses to come close enough to its human subjects to sympathize with their suffering. Sora deploys a visual motif of grids — security camera banks, apartment blocks, and the jigsaw-like glow of illuminated windows. It isn’t that there is no desire for intimacy; a stifled longing for exactly this kind of comfort is fed in; it is more that this world is designed to stymie and cut off the full bloom of this desire. As such a deeply melancholic affect is baked into the film’s existential prognosis, identifying its makers as men not machines.
Grade: B+
“Stranger Eyes” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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