‘Stranger Eyes’ Review: Yeo Siew Hua’s Elegant, Haunted Thriller About Voyeurism in a Time of Surveillance
At first it seems a premise shamelessly lifted from Michael Haneke’s “Caché”: A couple is disconcerted to receive an unmarked DVD in their mailbox, playing it to find footage of themselves being unwittingly filmed as they go about their day. But just as Haneke’s film took what seemed like a starting point for an effective domestic horror movie and pushed it into thorny sociopolitical territory, the slippery, shape-shifting psychodrama “Stranger Eyes” likewise has more on its mind than just the question of who’s watching who. Solving one mystery unexpectedly quickly before diving into deeper, more searching uncertainties of human behavior and relationships, the third feature from Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua gradually reveals a broken heart beneath its sleek, chilly veneer.
Yeo’s previous feature, the fluorescent neo-noir “A Land Imagined,” put him on the auteur map in 2018 by winning the top prize at Locarno, and announced — after his more experimental 2009 debut “In the House of Straw” — an affinity for genre-styled narratives with tricky time-hopping structures and a measure of social conscience. Glisteningly atmospheric and elegantly non-linear, “Stranger Eyes” follows in that vein, though it’s a more accomplished and enjoyable film, prioritizing character and feeling over convoluted storytelling gymnastics. If “A Land Imagined” was eye-catching enough to score a multi-territory Netflix deal, Yeo’s latest should get at least as much international exposure following its Venice competition premiere.
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The densely populated island state of Singapore makes a fine setting for a story of surveillance and private lives made public, given the challenges of being truly unseen in such an environment. Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), the young couple at the film’s center, live in the kind of vast, grid-like high-rise, facing another vast, grid-like high-rise, that lends itself to “Rear Window”-like curtain-twitching on a positively industrial scale. Even at home, they aren’t alone, sharing quarters with Junyang’s mother Shuping (Vera Chen) and their baby daughter Bo — a crowded arrangement, if not an uncommon one in this tightly squeezed society, that has put Junyang and Peiying’s relationship on fragile ground.
And that’s before Bo one day goes unaccountably missing, a crisis followed in short order by the arrival of that sinister DVD, followed in turn by several more like it, their contents ranging from banal everyday activities to considerably more intimate moments. The stalking of the couple and the apparent abduction of their child seem like they must be connected, but investigating police offer Zheng (Jeff Teo) offers only vague counsel, while arranging for the installation of a CCTV camera outside their door — one more surveillance device in a city where you already can’t move for them.
It’s no spoiler to say this spy-versus-spy strategy leads them to Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), the sad-eyed, middle-aged man who lives with his elderly mother in the apartment opposite — since the creepy recordings, while not exactly a red herring, are only the opening move in a strange, skittering dance of hesitant human connection, which leads even Junyang and Peiying to warily regard each other as strangers, while the ongoing search for their daughter painfully brings their insecurities as partners and as parents to the fore.
Just as you think you’ve got the film’s number, however, it takes another destabilizing temporal swerve, pulled off with such unfussy dexterity by editor Jean-Christophe Bouzy (celebrated for his flashier collaborations with Julia Ducournau) that we’re initially unsure how much time has passed, and in which direction. As a fuller chronology of family life emerges, the intrusive gaze of a third party exposes just how little Junyang and Peiying have ever really observed each other.
That Wu is played by Taiwanese legend Lee, in perhaps his most significant film role outside his career-long collaboration with Tsai Ming-liang, is an early giveaway that there’s more to his character than meets the eye, or the grainy surveillance lens. As “Stranger Eyes” pivots to focus on Wu and his silent, stifling solitude — and the panoply of distant, one-sided relationships he forms to feel less alone in the world — the grave, sorrowful reserve of Lee’s presence gives the film a well of emotion beneath its sharp narrative design, shimmery-cool cinematography and timely technophobia.
There’s a bigger social picture here, of course, as “Stranger Eyes” comments thoughtfully on a collective eradication of private life via sundry screens and lenses, and a fraying of the social fabric as a result. “You just have to watch someone closely enough,” Zheng advises the couple, “and at some point, even if he’s not a criminal, he will turn into one.” Still, amid its consistently tense, paranoid thriller trappings, Yeo’s film also functions in close-up, as a bittersweet, slightly broken-hearted character study, and a paean to lost era of community and trust.
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