Stranger Eyes

Stranger Eyes lives up to its voyeuristic premise by demanding our undivided attention as it slowly evolves from a kidnapping drama into a slow-burning surveillance thriller. Singaporean writer/director Yeo Siew Hua doesn’t just posit, as many have before, that to look at something is to change it. He suggests that the very act of looking will also change you and reveal uncomfortable truths that many of us would prefer to keep out of sight.

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Months after their daughter Little Bo goes missing at a neighborhood playground, Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying’s (Anicca Panna) trauma is compounded by the arrival of two DVDs left at their doorstep. The first is a surreptitious recording of their little girl from before she was taken, while the other is of Junyang walking through a shopping mall just hours before the discs were dropped off. The young couple, who have grown apart since the kidnapping, naturally assume that whoever has been watching them is also responsible for Little Bo’s disappearance. Yeo doesn't make it that simple.

Stranger Eyes shows events from the perspective of both the watcher and the watched, roles that reverse several times until the only thing we’re sure of is that everyone in this story was sad, lonely, and troubled long before Little Bo vanished. They soon discover who’s responsible for the recordings, but why he’s been filming them — and whether he also took Little Bo — remains unclear.

Junyang keeps a watchful eye everywhere he goes, constantly scanning for clues as to his daughter's disappearance. Yeo and cinematographer Hideho Urata film him in a way that inspires viewers to share that vigilance. Every frame is a potential piece of the puzzle, but more often than not the search is fruitless. The answer to the question “who’s watching whom, and why?” is rarely the same from one scene to the next, and the truth of Little Bo’s disappearance is ultimately something of a red herring. (It’s also inherently ironic: despite being surrounded by people and cameras, the girl’s kidnapping went completely unseen.) What follows that reveal is somewhat discursive, like an extended epilogue that deepens and enriches the entire experience.

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The more we see of Junyang and Peiying’s voyeur as the film’s perspective shifts from their point of view to his, the more we start to wonder if it’s all a coincidence and they’re simply undergoing two terrible, unrelated traumas at once. The voyeur is played by the revered Taiwanese actor Lee Kang-sheng, who’s appeared in every one of his countryman Tsai Ming-liang’s films and more recently starred in this year’s similarly melancholy Blue Sun Palace. There’s something menacing yet pitiful about his character, who proves that you don’t have to mean harm in order to cause it.

To look at something is to change it.

The line between when it’s acceptable to watch someone and when it isn’t has never been more blurred than it is today, when millions, including Peiying (a former DJ who still live streams herself spinning from time to time), broadcast themselves for anyone who cares to like and subscribe. Much of what we see in Stranger Eyes is filtered through a second screen — security footage, camcorders, cellphones — lending an air of unreality and artifice to it all. Yeo wants us to question what we’re seeing even as we’re intrigued by it. Watching a movie is nothing if not voyeuristic, and while Stranger Eyes doesn’t go so far as to suggest that observing its main trio somehow changes them, it does suggest that all three are ultimately unknowable.

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Despite these heady ideas, Stranger Eyes never comes across as a stern lecture on film theory or the surveillance state. It’s a gripping thriller that deftly explores how tragedy can bring us together and tear us apart, sometimes all at once. Junyang and Peiying are in a constant state of emotional whiplash, and only the most hardhearted viewers will fail to sympathize with them. “At some point, even if he’s not a criminal,” the detective investigating the case says of the suspect they’re surveilling, “he will turn into one.” If you look closely enough at something, Yeo seems to be telling us, you’ll see whatever you want. It just might not be the truth.