‘Stranger Eyes’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Yeo Siew Hua. Singapore/France/Taiwan/US. 2024. 126mins

Singapore ranks high on the global scale of cities with the densest concentration of CCTV cameras. Following on from his 2018 Locarno Golden Leopard winner A Land Imagined, Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua weaves an intriguing if somewhat bloodless human drama out of life in an urban fishbowl in which police surveillance, webcams, retail store security cameras and plain old analogue voyeurism are constant presences. A story that starts out with the disappearance of a two-year-old girl suggests that being too intensely watched can have a identity-dissolving effect.

Never less than intriguing, even when it doesn’t all add up

Playing in competition in Venice – a first for a Singaporean title – Stranger Eyes is a film that has its longueurs, especially as it drifts away from the tension of the missing child quest into something else entirely. But it’s never less than intriguing, even when it doesn’t all add up. Destined for further festival play, Yeo’s third fictional feature should also nuzzle into some arthouse berths, helped along perhaps by the presence of actor Lee Kang-sheng, know for his work with Tsai Ming-liang.

Colours are washed out, intense only in their neon or LED manifestations, in a Singapore whose outside spaces seem as closed-in as the interiors. This is a place that suffers from constant slippage between real spaces and digital spaces, and between what is real, what is digital, and what is dreamed. The courtyard of a residential block, the apartments that line it, a children’s playground, a police station full of glass cubicle rooms and the vast array of live surveillance camera footage that fill a whole wall of that police station induce a kind of existential vertigo that becomes the leitmotiv of this poised, elegiac, cerebral film.

Patience is required initially to move past a premise that never feels entirely emotionally grounded, given its severity. A couple in their twenties, Junyan (Wu Chien-ho) and Pei-ying (Anicca Panna) have lost their two-year-old daughter, Little Bo: she was abducted three months previously when Junyan became briefly distracted as she was playing in a local park. Junyan’s live-in mother Shu-ping (Vera Chen), a former dancer, is still handing out flyers, but her son and daughter-in-law seem numbed. Hope is revived when they begin to receive a series of DVDs from a mysterious source.

Lee Kang-sheng is hypnotic as Wu, a middle-aged supermarket manager who lives with his elderly mother in a flat directly across from the grieving couple. Her eyes aren’t good, but her lost and lonely son makes up for mum in constantly using his own– to spy on the neighbours on the other side of the courtyard, to check on the staff and customers where he works, to chat anonymously online with Pei-ying as she live video-streams her home DJ sessions, which Wu can see both on his screen and from his window. 

It’s the festive season in an equatorial city that has to manufacture winter – but it all feels as fake as the tinkly travesty of Beethoven’s ’Fur Elise’ that we hear at one point emanating from a toyshop display. Junyan works at an ice rink in a mall that also features a full-scale toboggan run. Or is that in another part of the city? In Stranger Eyes, spaces don’t join up. It’s in this artificially frozen landscape that the film’s emotions will begin to thaw, in a way that is both neat and just a little trite. But this odd journey is distinct and resonant enough for that not to matter too much.