Yeo Siew Hua’s Twisty Singaporean Thriller

With Stranger Eyes, ascendant Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua transmogrifies what looks at first like a creepy crime thriller into something much more tricksy, potent and ultimately puzzling, yet still rooted in recognizable human fragility. Already scheduled to travel to further festivals after its premiere in competition at Venice, this cerebral, downbeat mediation on voyeurism, exhibitionism, identity, guilt and loss — all that fun stuff — could ride a wave of critical support to niche distribution beyond Asia, especially in cinephile markets.  

Yeo’s work is known for its playful, pretzel-y approach to chronology and nested narratives, and while Stranger Eyes doesn’t dive as far as his A Land Imagined did into the meta end of the pool, it gets its feet wet. Like its predecessor, it starts in the middle and then flashes back, and drops in strange moments where time seems to shift for characters who overlap and parallel one another. There are lots of mirrored or doubled figures: two fathers who have neglected and let down their daughters, for instance; two mothers full of resentment over careers sacrificed for children; and stalked people who start stalking their stalkers back.

The inciting incident that actually happens in medias res but near the beginning of the film is the abduction of Bo, the toddler daughter of father Junyang (Wu Chien-Ho) and mother Peiying (Anicca Panna). When we first meet the couple making tearful appeals on TV and social media for witnesses to come forward, they seem like sympathetic victims, stricken with grief over the loss of their child. In a practically an instant, when Junyang was distracted on his cellphone, someone snatched Bo from a neighborhood playground, and for once, the surveillance cameras placed all around the park failed to record the abduction. Nevertheless, investigating officer Zheng (Pete Teo) is sure that if they just keep combing through the zillabytes of CCTV footage available to the Singapore police, they’ll catch someone doing something illegal and break the case.

Turns out, there’s much more to the couple’s own story than meets the eye. Flashbacks and illicitly taken footage — burned onto DVDs that start arriving slipped under their door, evoking the similar mail drops in Michael Haneke’s Hidden — will reveal a deep rift in Junyang and Peiying’s marriage. The two have not been especially devoted parents to poor Bo, a result partly of resentments and strife arising from having to share an apartment with Junyang’s self-absorbed mother (Vera Chen). Onetime party girl and aspiring DJ Peiying misses her clubbing life and recreates it through her Discord channel, where she uploads footage of herself spinning discs. An employee at an ice rink where he works the Zamboni, symbolically smoothing down scuffed surfaces all day, Junyang has been cheating on Peiying with both a male colleague and a female one, having threesomes in the locker room. Who knew ice rinks were such hotbeds of kink?

We learn this because part of the narrative also follows Lao Wu (Lee Kang-Sheng, a longtime muse of Taiwanese auteur Tsai Ming-liang), a lonely grocery store manager who seems to have a crush on Peiying and lives directly opposite the couple with his aged, blind mother (Maryanne Ng-Yew). Spoiler alert, even though it isn’t really that big a deal and is revealed early anyway: It’s been Wu sending the DVDs. Does this mean he’s the one who abducted Bo? Or will the endless layers of surveillance and observation reveal a different truth about the abducted child whom no one, it’s worth stressing again, was keeping an eye on when she went missing?

This being an arthouse festival entry, nothing is explained entirely satisfactorily as we move into the last reels. Instead, the characters start fracture and layer atop one another, like images in a kaleidoscope. DP Hideho Urata’s lighting grows more lurid and disorienting, which meshes with the jagged editing (by Jean-Christophe Bouzy) of the last stretch. But what saves this from being just best-of list bait for upmarket film critics is the sincerity of the performances, especially from the core trio of Wu, Lee and Panna, each of whom projects a profound loneliness that’s never more apparent than when they’re in the middle of a crowded place. Which, this being Singapore, is just about everywhere.