Stranger Eyes: unnerving Singaporean thriller interrogates contemporary surveillance culture

It’s not possible to discuss Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes without revealing at least some of its secrets. The opening scene shows young marrieds Junyang and Peiying scanning home-video footage of themselves with their infant daughter Bo, who, we learn, has disappeared from a public playground while her father was distracted by a phonecall from his mother. The police investigation of the kidnapping has barely begun before an unmarked DVD is slipped under the couple’s front door, showing Junyang out shopping. Another disc arrives soon after, shot that very morning, showing Junyang following a pram-pushing mother into a big store and visiting the toy department. Before they know it, the parents seem even more disturbed by the unknown voyeur’s surveillance than by the loss of their child. Naturally enough, they assume that the voyeur is also the child-snatcher. 

The missing-child mystery is soon eclipsed by the characters’ growing awareness of how much they are being watched. Police officer Zheng installs a CCTV camera to monitor their front door and see who is delivering the DVDs – thereby adding to the huge battery of security cameras which already have the modern apartment block under surveillance. Peiying has a substantial presence online as a DJ and interacts with a virtual stalker who declines to send his photo. Her husband Junyang starts noticing that video cameras are watching him everywhere he goes. Conscious of being seen all the time, both of them become more self-aware and more anxious about their daydreams, as if the cameras could capture those too. Yeo’s Chinese title for the film ‘Moshi Lu’ means, approximately, ‘Silent Witness Records‘ (it also works as an aural pun on the Chinese name of the New Testament Book of Revelation) and his script duly morphs into a set of questions about surveillance culture: Has privacy been lost entirely? How about the line between safeguarding and intrusion? What effect does constantly being watched have on the individual psyche? 

As in Yeo’s more ‘political’ previous feature A Land Imagined (2018), there’s a sense that these questions have site-specific resonances in Singapore, where state surveillance is ubiquitous, where everyone except the very poor and very rich lives in identical high-rise blocks that face each other, and where social control is an axiom. It’s also poignantly Singaporean that key scenes are set on an ice-skating rink and in a ‘winter wonderland’ attraction – the equatorial island-state being a place that never experiences real winter or snow. But Yeo is cosmopolitan enough to acknowledge that the questions are universal: the film contains fleeting visual echoes of Fritz Lang, Hitchcock, Haneke and Kieślowski, amongst other directors concerned about spying and being spied on. He is not, though, simply denouncing what Lang called The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse – state surveillance in fact eventually solves the mystery of the child-snatch – but rather worrying about the ways that surveillance, both involuntary and voluntary, makes his characters think about themselves and each other.  

The identity of the voyeur is discovered fairly easily, and leads the film into an extended flashback in which his own circumstances and recent activities are explored and partly explained. But the flashback also looks at the state of the central marriage (both husband and wife have been unfaithful since the birth of their child – in a rather surprising way in the case of the husband) and refocuses the film onto alienated human relationships in general. Ironies abound: Junyang and Peiying learn more about each other from videos than they ever have from cohabiting in their marriage or parenting their child. 

Much of the film’s heavy lifting is achieved through astute casting. Wu Chien-Ho (Junyang) and Annica Panna (Peiying) are both note-perfect, coming alive emotionally only when they recapture the feelings of their adolescent years. The Malaysian singer-actor Pete Teo is an inspired choice to play the policeman, mixing a weary paternal bonhomie with subtle hints of bad patriarch. The real coup is the casting of Tsai Mingliang’s fetish actor Lee Kang-Sheng as the voyeur, a forlorn apparent incel who lives with his alcoholic mother; taciturn and generally expressionless, he brings a lifetime of playing droll, enigmatic outsiders to the role.

After resolving its narrative mysteries, the film ends with a lengthy coda in which the main characters’ fears, pains and tremulous hopes are laid bare with new clarity. Some viewers will be reminded of what Kieślowski achieved in A Short Film about Love/Dekalog 6 (1988). 

► Stranger Eyes screened in the Thrill strand at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival. It does not yet have UK distribution.