Writers and Director: Siew Hua Yeo
Examining all kinds of voyeurism through CCTV, personal video and observation, the act of watching comes under scrutiny in Siew Hua Yeo’s film Stranger Eyes screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024. Predatory or protective, this Singapore-set movie starts as a thriller about a child going missing and the ways in which footage gives insight not only into the day of Little Bo’s abduction but also the context of her family life, but Yeo’s film soon evolves beyond this, taking a less structured approach to viewing others and how infectious the act of observation might be.
Parents Peiying (Anicca Panna) and Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) are distraught when their daughter is taken from a playground but weeks later the police are no closer to tracing her. Soon a series of DVDs containing filmed footage of her parents in the days before and after the crime arrive at their home, and both become intrigued by the person sending them. As they are getting closer to the truth, the story of the sender reveals a new perspective.
It is unusual but secretly delightful to see a story set in 2023 built around the DVD – Yeo has good reasons for that; partly the traceability of the technology which wouldn’t be possible with streaming and emailed links that would involve the police, metadata and IP addresses (far less glamorous), but also for character reasons. The reliance on a format that has been consistent over many years is crucial to the film’s outcome providing yet another angle from which to view the story and the purpose of the watching that has taken place throughout.
The strength of Stranger Eyes lies in its early scenes as the mysterious footage starts to cast suspicion around about the whereabouts of the missing child and whether at least one of her parents is to blame. The combination of parental distress that Yeo develops alongside the elusive motivation of both Peiying and Junyang as well as the sender, Lao Wu (Kang-sheng Lee), is nicely balanced, opening up lots of possible directions for the rest of the movie.
And the writer-director merges the cameras used for filming with ones that sit squarely in the characters’ world, so we see them in the story’s locations but also on CCTV in shops and apartment blocks but also through Wu’s personal camera which he uses to capture their actions, seemingly for his personal use along with some Rear Window-style nosiness from adjoining apartment blocks. Yet, Yeo doesn’t really take the opportunities this presents, and despite some digressions into Junyang’s strange behaviour in a shopping centre, his relationship with a co-worker that hots up visually but doesn’t lead anywhere in the story and his growing obsession with Wu, the film slides into a broader concept of what it means to watch and be watched without drawing any particular conclusions.
The final section of the film instead explores online fandom and Junyang’s transition to a watcher without ever really mining any of the characters for depth or motivation. Some of the storylines are resolved but others are left open, preferring instead to leave us with the commentary that ultimately that being watched and being the watcher is within us all.
Stranger Eyes is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
