J Paul Johnson
Stranger Eyes, Yeo Siew Hua’s meditative surveillance-state thriller, has a lot to recommend it. It was a nominee for the Golden Lion at Venice, earned Best Supporting Actor for the legendary Lee Kang-sheng at Taipei, and is Singapore’s official selection for Best International Feature for the 98th Academy Awards. Anchored by an enigmatic performance by Kang-Sheng, a lonely security guard whose obsessions slowly dominate the narrative, Stranger Eyes uses its lost-child conceit to explore the dozens of ways in which modern surveillance and media technologies make us all both watchers and watched.
In its way, Stranger Eyes aspires to be something of a Rear Window—or perhaps Michael Haneke’s Cache—for our post-postmodern times. It begins with an abduction, although to be frank, the sudden disappearance of little Bo, a precocious toddler, is little more than a Hitchcockian Macguffin. Bo is the daughter of Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), a young married couple living with Junyang’s mother, Shuping (Vera Chen). Bo’s disappearance seems to exacerbate some fissures in the young couple’s relationship, but they are united, along with Shuping, in their determination to find their daughter.
Unfortunately for the fractured family, there are no clues and no leads until they begin receiving mysterious packages at their door containing DVDs marked only by dates (the film is set in the present; the couple has to unearth an old disc player from their mother’s storage to view the contents). The DVDs are of Junyang and Peiying going about their daily business, both before and since Bo’s disappearance: not only is the footage unnerving for its violation of their privacy, but it also exposes several of their secrets. Their marriage has been on shaky ground since well before Bo’s disappearance.
Peiying in Stranger Eyes. Photo: courtesy Film Movement.
To suspect their voyeur of abducting Bo makes all kinds of sense, both to the parents and to viewers, but the subsequent police investigation yields nothing to mark the suspect—Lao Wu (Kang-sheng), a lonely security guard living with his aged mother—as connected to Bo. Here, in the film’s second act, its point of view shifts subtly from that of Junyang and Peiying to that of Wu, following him as he conducts his surveillance of the couple. He espies and records Junyang both investigating Bo’s disappearance and flirting with—sometimes f*cking—chance encounters along the way. Peiying, meanwhile, streams herself dancing and mixing club music from their apartment, not yet realizing that one of her fans, with whom she starts texting, is the man she suspects of having stolen her daughter.
Siew Hua’s direction here focuses on the thematic, sometimes at the expense of the expository. That security cameras are practically omnipresent and young moderns more isolated than connected by social media is a given: Siew Hua will string together ominous montages of practically anthropomorphized cameras silently scrutinizing the landscape in transition sequences echoing Yasujirō Ozu. Peiying’s desperation to be seen, if not by her husband then by any random member of her fandom willing to engage her in dialogue, seems a perfect metaphor for the ways social media can isolate more so than connect. And Junyang, who has been, with Peiying, the subject of Wu’s surveillance, becomes the surveillant himself, eventually uncovering something far afield from what he intended.
Stranger Eyes’ rich thematics and complex visual design don’t quite mask what seem to me, though, to be some fairly basic narrative deficiencies. Little Bo’s disappearance, the plot’s inciting event, is eventually resolved via deus ex machina and has next to no effect on any of the principals; it’s given only the most perfunctory of scenes before the narrative moves on to an entirely unrelated, and to my thinking unmotivated, relationship. Some of what happens in the film’s final act seems to require significant suspension of disbelief, especially when Wu’s mysterious surveillance DVDs take on a wholly new subject—and, for no logical reason I can think of—a voice-over track aimed at a subject I can only describe as a remarkable coincidence. The strains on credulity in the final act threaten to undermine the whole of the narrative.
Panna, Chen, and especially Kang-sheng as the forlorn security guard, give excellent, nuanced performances. As Junyang, who is here both father and son, husband and adulterer, the surveilled and the surveillant, Chien-Ho carries the film’s largest burden. Yet he plays almost every scene—whether reacting to his child’s disappearance, processing his wife’s rejection, conducting his solo investigation, or engaging in a hot throuple at work—with the same lack of affect. It’s hard to care too much about what happens in a narrative when the protagonist himself does not much seem to.
Still, for its faults, Stranger Eyes resonates deeply both visually and thematically. Its design registers the multiple aesthetics of watching on screens—laptops, phones, tablets, televisions, monitors, etc.—in ways that feel compelling and cohesive, and its focus on surveillance is even more motivated in a post-Covid era. Would that the details of its narrative not quite so blithely elide logic or its protagonist seem quite so blasé in his search for his missing child, it would earn its aspirations to Hitchcock and Haneke.
