‘Stranger Eyes’ Review: The First Singapore Venice Competition Title is a Well-Crafted Thriller | Venice

Stranger Eyes by Yeo Siew Hua has already made history as Venice’s first ever Golden Lion contender hailing from Singapore, but it is its stylish genre flair, combined with an impressively opaque script, that make it a solid entry in this year’s Competition. It stars Taiwanese actor Wu Chien-ho as a young father named Junyang who loses sight of his baby daughter at a playground for just a few minutes. Suddenly, she disappears. After months of searching and countless flyers given out,  Junyang and his wife Peiying (Anicca Panna) find themselves at a standstill, looking through all the home videos they’ve recorded of their two-year-old child, hoping for a lead. The husband’s overbearing mother (Vera Chen) is less and less helpful, while his partner slips into depression: throughout the film, they barely talk to one another. But one day, a DVD slipped under their doorstep brings hope. It turns out, someone has been watching (over) them for some time now.

Yeo’s third film is a slow burner, not too dissimilar to the way his previous works unfolded in time and through unpredictable character interactions. His 2009 debut feature In the House of Straw is associated with the Singapore New Wave and his follow-up, A Land Imagined snagged the top prize at the 2018 Locarno Film Festival. New to Venice, but known at the festival circuit, Yeo continues to work within the elegantly drawn limits of genre, especially those of mystery and thriller, while adding touches of sincerity and moving silences that puncture otherwise rigid conventions. Strangers Eyes is an elusive film, insofar as it keeps the viewer guessing: not only the outcome, but also the motivations of each character as they stray from their designated paths as parents, partners, or both. 

Judging by the content of the DVDs they receive, Peiying and  Junyang have found themselves on the receiving end of a fascination that veers into stalking. Mundane activities, such as grocery shopping, and intimate moments of nursing or sex are caught on tape from a distance, but always in long, uninterrupted episodes. Their videotaped family life has been archived by a stranger and their own confrontation with the footage—especially when they’re looking for clues around their daughter’s disappearance—exposes them to themselves. It’s a beguiling choice to have these two events converge in time for the couple, but it effectively lays bare their deep mismatch and their inability to articulate why things between them don’t work. Yeo’s script and direction tackles this so well within the mystery-thriller genre conventions that the heavy silences characters share speak louder than any of their words or actions.

A lot happens in this film—from police investigations to unveiling the stalker and getting to know him and his circumstances—and at the same time the plot doesn’t rely on any of those developments. Stranger Eyes has a powerful mood, mostly of dread and deeply rooted regret, permeating every cold-colored frame of its pristine cinematography, so it doesn’t need that much logical coherency. It looks and feels like a mystery thriller, but its twists and turns (even the biggest ones) are never there for the shock factor. All of these features make sure Stranger Eyes would percolate in the mind of a viewer long after the credits roll.

Perhaps the most striking figure in the film is that of Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng of Tsai Ming- liang’s films) who can command the emotional tone of the film only with the intent of his gaze. He becomes more prominent in the film’s second half when Stranger Eyes turns to him, his home, work, and his own mother and the audience assumes the overriding role of voyeur supreme, omniscient and omnipotent. Yet, it remains unclear why Wu does what he does until the film’s very end (and even then it’s largely left to us to make our own conclusions), but that doesn’t take away the pleasure and thrill of watching him. 

Surveillance and the doubling of the gaze through cameras is a recurring theme in the film as a whole, and Yeo is a skillful enough director to never allow Stranger Eyes to be too obvious in its messages. Ambivalence is key: between looking and being looked at, there is always an exchange of gazes that reformulates a hierarchy between two people and that is what the film re-enacts on visual, narrative, and conceptual levels, to a commendable degree. It surely won’t satisfy the most curious viewers whose need for neat plots and desire to guess the ending may have them hooked at first, but even without any of that, Stranger Eyes remains a lingering presence and an unsolved riddle to carry with you for a while.

Grade: B-

This review is from the 2024 Venice Film Festival where Stranger Eyes had its world premiere in competition. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.