Do you ever sit – at the park, in a cafe, or on the bus – and just watch? Humanity passes you by, their own little worlds unchanged by your gaze: a man with a pushchair, a runner with headphones, a tradesperson. You imagine what their life perhaps entails: the man has had no sleep; the runner is a high-flying professional de-stressing with a morning run; the tradesperson is heading home to their family. However, maybe the father has had a good night’s sleep; the runner is unemployed; the tradesperson is a business owner who lives alone. When we survey our fellow humans like this, we can only ever get brief glimpses, imprinting a perspective based on our own experiences. This limited perspective is one of many themes covered in Yeo Siew Hua’s precise and patient Singapore-set thriller STRANGER EYES, a sublime film about how we can look but never truly see.
In Singapore, someone is always looking. With about 18 cameras per 1,000 people, it is the most surveilled country in the world. In STRANGER EYES, cameras and screens are everywhere; not just CCTV cameras but phones, tourists, DSLR cameras, doorbells, and even Discord live streams. They inhabit every second of Singaporean residents’ lives. But that doesn’t stop young father Junyang (Wu Chien-Ho) from being disturbed by his image appearing on camcorder footage that has been hand delivered, flung underneath the door of his 13th-floor flat; footage that shows him having sex with partner Peiying (Anicca Panna), stealing from the grocery store, and of him previously abandoning his child. The latter is made all the more disturbing within the text when you consider that the baby daughter of the couple has been missing for three months, and the kidnapping was not caught by any camera.
“STRANGER EYES shapeshifts before you, executing a discombobulating shift in perspective away [which] re-contextualises our perceptions […] of the couple.”
STRANGER EYES opens with this missing young girl, observed through her grandmother’s phone at a park. The act of looking – specifically through screens – that Yeo employs is not quite in the vein of Aneesh Chaganty’s SEARCHING but is a thematic sibling. SEARCHING covers the search of a missing child through screens and operates solely within that image. In contrast, STRANGER EYES shapeshifts before you, executing a discombobulating shift in perspective away from Junyang’s tirade to find his daughter. The resulting film isn’t quite structured like Kurosawa’s RASHOMON, but it re-contextualises our perceptions of Junyang and Peiying from the lens of the stalker providing the footage of the couple.
Yeo is operating on an extraordinarily high intellectual plane of thinking as the film languishes in still images, his camera tilting and panning as it observes characters observing screens playing footage observing other people. STRANGER EYES is laden with a sense of voyeurism similar to that of Hitchcock’s REAR WINDOW, where Yeo’s camera intrudes on unknowing neighbours. The camera leers at these people, lured down floor by floor by our insistence to observe like we are gazing at a form of CCTV. Yeo’s patient images make his audience an unwitting voyeur by inviting and even threatening us to look away. Shots of a tower block are framed elegantly with a long lens, the chunks of light from each window allowing a brief look into the life within. Each window is an aquarium, and his camera is a child tapping the glass.
STRANGER EYES is a film predominantly about how alienated our lives are from each other when we only have brief samples from behind our screens. The characters rotate around each other, with Yeo examining how this sense of loneliness can become cyclical. If we don’t engage with humanity, we will endlessly look at our families and ourselves but never see them. Yeo achieves this separation between families on admittedly sparse terms with a third-act reveal, one that may have been better placed as a centrepiece rather than in his denouement, but STRANGER EYES is a melting pot: every tiny idea is homogenised with the grander portrait of Singapore’s surveillance culture and the consequent erosion of privacy.
“STRANGER EYES is a film predominantly about how alienated our lives are from each other when we only have brief samples from behind our screens. [We] will endlessly look at our families and ourselves but never see them.”
Nevertheless, one such idea that finds itself filtering out of this thematic soup is a pervasive sense of justice and vigilantism. The character stalking the couple does so for reasons that alter your preconceived notions about them. Junyang’s reprehensible actions become recognisable as the actions of a desperate man not just in search of his child but in search of forgiveness. The stalker and Junyang then appear as a form of yin and yang, their opposing actions reflecting the moral complexity that resides within. Where the stalker’s morally complicated actions revolve around his loneliness, Junyang is more prone to lie and cheat: his infidelity as part of a bisexual threesome recorded from afar is another element that contributes to the whirlpool of voyeuristic themes. Junyang presents himself as a devoted father and husband to Peiying, a pixie-cut Discord streamer who performs rave music in her living room. Yet this posturing is a means to an end, his relationship already crumbling before his daughter’s disappearance, and it takes the gaze of the stalker to puncture those outward appearances. Yeo doesn’t leave Peiying unscathed by the camera’s lens, either. Peiting is amongst this triptych of characters acting shadily, the facade of her digital identity slipping when there are no cameras to witness her.
Yeo’s deliberately paced STRANGER EYES captures loneliness in complex ways and how lenses and screens obscure our vision of the true person underneath. The film metamorphoses from a paranoid thriller into a moving study of the neuroses we have around our very existence on screen. It takes the opening kidnapping mystery and strips back the layers of identity like those of a matryoshka doll until all that is left is the tiny nugget of humanity existing underneath. It is a film that is both deeply cynical and resoundingly humane in portraying the hyper-surveilled Singapore. Everyone is under scrutiny, but their humanity remains beyond the camera’s gaze.