Surveillance Thriller About A Missing Child Is The Great Kind Of Slow Burn [Venice]

There are different ways for a movie to execute a slow burn, but the ones I admire most withhold not their stories, but their identities.

Stranger Eyes

has a straightforward thriller premise and a clear interest in surveillance, both of which are clear from the outset, but its shape is hardly a straight line. As it leads us around corners into places we didn’t expect to be, what the movie has to say about surveillance slowly comes into view. For those with the patience to sit mired in uncertainty, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s film offers unexpected rewards.

Stranger Eyes Is Built Like A Traditional Thriller

But Gradually Evolves Into Something Else

Tragedy has already struck by the time the film begins. Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) are a young couple reeling over the disappearance of their daughter. Junyang, we learn, had been watching her, but in the time it took to have a short phone call with his mother, Shuping (Vera Chen), Little Bo was suddenly gone. The police have told them to sit tight while they investigate, but they’re understandably impatient. Shuping has taken to handing out flyers where she went missing, to the discomfort of local families, now too scared to play there.

Junyang doesn’t seem to be handling it well. We watch him follow a local mom and her baby girl into a mall, and then a children’s toystore. When the mom’s distracted, he lifts the child out of her stroller and holds her. The camera sometimes seems to be following him as he does this, its perspective suggesting a real-world point of view. Then, when he gets home, Peiying is watching a DVD someone just slipped under the door, with footage of Junyang and Bo in a grocery store over a year ago. Then they get another, filmed just that day.

Police Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) has cameras set up outside their apartment, though Junyang again tries to take matters into his own hands. Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), a middle-aged man from the building across the street, emerges as a suspect, and we soon start spending a lot more time with him. We learn the extent to which he’s been watching this young family. We learn what he’s seen, some of which shifts the ground beneath our feet. But the question of why hangs ominously in the air.

The Nature Of Observation Is Truly Unpacked In Stranger Eyes

Yeo Siew Hua’s Film Comes To Insightful Conclusions

Stranger Eyes builds its web of surveillance gradually. The film makes us aware of the different ways and contexts in which we are recorded: home videos on family members’ phones; security tapes in public areas; livestreams we film ourselves; camcorder shots unknowingly taken in private moments. Yeo then builds the language of observation into the filmmaking, until we start to obsessively keep track of the camera’s movement and positioning. A monocular scan of apartments recalls Rear Window; the discs of secret footage recall Caché.

Though Little Bo’s recovery still drives the plot, the film becomes less preoccupied with what all this surveillance can accomplish than its effects on the people involved. What does observing and recording someone do to them? In some ways it reveals truths about who they are; in others, it traps pieces of them in amber and mistakes them for the whole. And how about the person doing the observing? The more we learn about the depths of Lao’s voyeurism, the more we see that path opening up before Junyang.

For a long time, as the film descends into murkier and murkier territory, I wondered if Yeo’s aim was just to complicate our understandings of what it means to see and be seen. But when the story appears ready to wrap up, an unexpected fourth act unfolds. At one point, Officer Zheng talks to Junyang about the ubiquity of surveillance. Policework is all about patience now; criminals always reveal themselves. Watch anyone long enough, he posits, and if they aren’t already a criminal, they’ll eventually become one.

Strange Eyes could’ve ended with this message and been a good film, but it’s when Yeo decides instead to unpack Zheng’s claim that it becomes a great one. By the end, the relationship between observer and observed is proven far more nuanced than it appeared at the beginning, or than in the policeman’s estimation. In a world where both roles are a defining part of daily life, this movie has found something essential to teach us.

Stranger Eyes premiered at the Venice Film Festival in Official Competition. The film is 125 minutes long and is not yet rated. While it will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 28, the film is not yet scheduled for wide release in the US.