‘Stranger Eyes’ Review: Ostensibly A Missing-Child Thriller, Yeo Siew Hua’s Alluring Film Takes A Strange Turn — Venice Film Festival

Stephanie Bunbury
·4 min read

Full of false leads and meandering shifts of focus, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s story of a missing child initially appears to be a straight-up thriller. Here is a young couple with their child Little Bo, being filmed in the park by Bo’s overbearing grandmother. Here they are at home, miserable shells of their former selves, watching all the home movies they can find in the hope of finding a hint of what might have happened to Little Bo, who has now been missing for three months.

Her father Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) comes in with sandwiches; he could be sleep-walking. Peiying (Annica Panna), her mother, hasn’t bothered to dress properly; she seems to be all eyes, staring at the screen. There is no hint of the glamorous clubber we will see later, as the films of the family’s lives before their loss keep popping up. The investigating detective keeps telling them to go home, watch videos and wait for his call, but Junyang is past bearing the burden of patience. In a chilling sequence, he follows a woman with a baby in a pram. When her back is turned, he picks the baby up. Yet nothing comes of it; nothing comes of most of their efforts, not even embarrassment. She must not have seen him.

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Seeing is the subject of Stranger Eyes: seeing and not noticing, how we value the familiar, how we interpret things we only half-know. After Junyang’s trip to the toy shop, other DVDs start to appear, passed under the door in plain envelopes, that show them all going about their business in the playground and supermarket. Later DVDs show them in bed; they are obviously filmed from the opposite apartment block. Both the police and the couple themselves start to close in on the voyeur, who is presumed to be the kidnapper. A camera is installed above their front door; Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) takes his own turn as a voyeur, chortling over what he sees of their lives. More deliveries arrive. The stalker is duly identified as Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), an undermanager in the local supermarket.

At the very point when, in any conventional thriller, the net would close, the focus swings around 180 degrees to follow Lao Wu’s life. Like Junyang and his wife, he lives with a dominating, demanding mother. She berates him for his failure to mend his broken family with all the self-righteousness of a habitual drunk; later we find more about that family, his own bleak story and why he started filming, years before.

It is his anxiety about the fault lines he has seen in his neighbors’ family life that drove him to start following and recording them, horrified by what he sees; gradually, the original picture of parents driven mad by anxiety tilts to reveal the other tensions underpinning their lives, their burning secrets and the lies they tell each other. Lao Wu unearths these secrets almost by accident, but so do the cameras clustered around their apartment block and through the malls that are the nerve centers of Singaporean life.

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Peiying has built her own life around the camera’s gaze; she is a DJ on her own website, a hot rock chick dancing with an audience of virtual fans. It is startling to realize that this is not a flashback; we have already heard Christmas music in the mall and here is Peiying in a Santa outfit, giving the fans a festive mix. For a few minutes, at least, the hunt for Little Bo has been sidelined.

By the time the child is found — and it is no spoiler to say this, given that the film has moved beyond that loss to a more inchoate sense of emptiness and loss permeating the rest of their lives — her recovery is passed over in a moment. There is no explanation for how they tracked her down. Patience, says Officer Zheng, quite impatiently. Yeo Siew Hua certainly isn’t going to bother with details of a missing persons case. That has long since ceased to be the point. The point is how these people see themselves and their lives, through veils of delusion and deceit. It is a meandering, strange film, in which the ostensible thriller framework ultimately feels like an obstruction and the characters remain indistinct. But that discordant strangeness is also its allure.

Title: Stranger Eyes
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Yeo Siew Hua
Cast: Wu Chien-Ho, Lee Kang-Sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-Yew
Sales agent: Playtime
Running time: 2 hr 5 mins

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