Spanning 750 square kilometers, it would be unwise to commit a crime in Singapore. Not that it’s impossible to commit a crime in the city-state, but it sure is impossible to get away with it. The Southeast Asian nation is one of the most surveilled countries in the world with more than 100,00 cameras watching the moves of its 6 million strong population, which makes the central conflict of “Stranger Eyes” – a missing child – all the more elusive. But as the film progresses, writer-director Yeo Siew Hua intentionally shifts gears from a potential police procedural into a melancholic, existential study of how even in the age of mass surveillance, we seek our temptations and despite being watched by a camera, seldom do we feel seen in any meaningful way.
This narrative friction between seeing and being seen, being realized, and being wanted when there’s no chance of reciprocation is at the core of this taut thriller. Subversion is a critical cog in the vast and complex narrative engine that propels “Stranger Eyes” from its neo-noir conventions and into an existential mystery about human connection. The first Singaporean entry to compete for the Golden Lion in the Venice Film Festival, it’s silly to dismiss “Stranger Eyes” as a data-driven drama with its camera-watching characters.
In reality, it’s deeply intelligent, languidly paced, tensions and paranoia bubbling away, as it takes liberties from its neo-noir predecessors to paint a chilling contemporary portrait of a cold, detached world where emotions feel like explosions and words must be excavated like gemstones. Sterility is a stylistic choice derived from the theme of mass surveillance which we quickly learn is a lens Hua uses to explore the interiority of his characters – the drained color palette, voyeuristic framing, and eerie score manifests an unsmiling atmosphere that’s telling of the misery of the characters.
As for the misery, we learn its history after the main tragedy – Little Bo’s disappearance. The first task the husband, Junyang, and wife, Peiying must do to find the possible whereabouts of their little baby Bo is to parse through video footage. Taking a page out of Michael Haneke’s “Hidden” (which Hua does multiple times), we see footage shot using a digicam of the young, unbroken family enjoying a picnic in the park. It’s worth noting that Peiying wears a t-shirt with the text ‘I’m Watching You,’ which is a thematic easter egg more than an obnoxious message. It’s been two months since their daughter was whisked away from a playground when Junyang was on a phone call with his mother.
The movie begins in media res, the couple now deeply estranged from each other, losing hope by the hour. A crack in the case appears in the form of CDs slipped under their door. The videos capture the couple shopping, trying to have sex, and other mundane activities recorded from unsuspecting positions. The cops nab the ‘stalker’ – a supermarket manager named Wu, played by a formidable Lee Kang-sheng, a taciturn middle-aged man who lives with an ailing mother in the apartment opposite Junyang and Peiying’s, a perfect “Rear Window” setting. Wu’s fetish for watching the young couple, we learn, happened unexpectedly. But his presence in their orbit cannot be reversed, and it sets off a chain reaction of life-changing events that lead to a pleasantly surprising climax
The visual language accommodates much of the complex interactions and subtle ambiguities of the fatal trio – the power of the traditional camera is trumped by security cameras, digicams, web streams, social media, live cams, etc, that are distinct in the type of footage it shows and glorifies the act of voyeurism. It’s refreshing to watch a director expertly balance how much should be revealed and left to interpretation and choose which footage to use where.
Lee Kang Sheng emanates a magnetic aura that’s unpredictable, deeply unsettling but at the same time oddly inviting, diffusing further enigma as he commands the entire narrative with this heavy face and sparse words. Perhaps it may be a tedious watch because the real climax is unlike what we imagine it to be. But Hua brings an original twist to a contemporary “Peeping Tom,” making it hard not to watch this brilliant thriller.
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