Almost everyone owns a smartphone now. A tiny recording device and track in nearly six billion pockets worldwide. They’ve become a part of our lives to point where we make jokes about the FBI peering through our baby photos. Like Peiying (Anicca Panna), while we can’t stop the government stop the government from snooping into our data, we can at least bar strangers from looking at it. Keen to keep her toddler away from any stranger’s gaze online, she privately stores her family videos on the computer:
“I want Little Bo to decide for herself whether to make her videos public when she grows up.”
But sadly it wasn’t enough to stop her Little Bofrom getting snatched up. Her and Junyang’s (Wu Chien-ho) only daughter has become a missing person’s case after an unfortunate trip to the local playground. And as the days mount and with their Little Bo still not found, the couple find themselves wandering through life without much hope. But when a mysterious DVD arrives on their doorstep, they prepare themselves for the worst.
Despite covering our webcams with protective locks or blurring the backgrounds of our Zoom calls, many of us forget the more analogue forms of surveillance that follow us daily. The security cameras in our shopping centres, the microphones in our favourite karaoke bars, or more simply, the creeps with their Handycam camcorders.
Presumably recorded by the perpetrator, the couple watch in complete silence as their lives with Bo – excursions to the grocery store and even peeks into their sex life – are recorded by some voyeuristic madman. With no other option but to work with the police and conduct their own surveillance of the criminal, becomes a question of whether Little Bo will be found alive at all?
Films like Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes (2024) – those thrillers inspired by Alfred Hitchcock – are about as prevalent as CCTV cameras in major cities. Yet, it takes more than subtle visual homages to Rebecca (1940) or Rear Window (1954) to make a great film. When you consider Asia’s own contribution to the genre with directors like Takashi Miike from Japan and his film Audition (2000) – or the many, many modern masters from Korea (Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon Ho, Kim Jee-woon) – are already doing Hitchcock and then some, you need to bring something that really keeps the audience’s eyeballs glued to the screen.
Nevertheless, Yeo Siew Hua’s attempt to emulate the classics feels flat by comparison. Tension is expected from face-value elements – a missing child, grieving parents and a perverted stalker – but relies heavily on performances that simply do not work. Panna and Chien-Ho come off more bored than numb, as they stare at footage of their supposed daughter with blank expressions and yawn through their basic dialogue exchanges.
However, when the police come close to nabbing the couple’s sadistic perp by the end of the first act, the audience realises that the film’s dry performances may have been the point all along, and that though poorly conveyed though subpar acting, the couple may not want their happy family life after all.
Because far from being sadistic and anything but a stalker, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng) is a simple grocery store manager. He may be lonely, divorced and looking after his legally blind mother, but pervert he is not. His filming of the couple is not so much an obsession over their infant daughter, but a collating of evidence as the couple may not be doting parents after all. This first becomes clear to Wu when, while on shift, he witnesses Junyang abandon his daughter for several hours in a shopping trolley. Stunned as he watches her on his security monitor, the child wails for her father in the underground car-park. Peiying meanwhile is discovered by Wu to be too busy live-streaming her DJ career on Twitch to look after her little girl. But when his prying goes a little too far and causes him to not only develop feelings for Peiying, but capture Junyang’s most vulnerable secret, Wu realises he must break the couple’s rift himself with the evidence he’s gathered or find a way to bring them closer together.
Kang-Shen is acting well above Stranger Eyes’ pay grade. Delivering a far kinder yet equally arresting performance from Blue Sun Palace, his turn to a Jimmy Stewart stand-in is endlessly charming. And unlike his co-stars, his ability to convey brokenness is far easier to believe. Whether he’s busy jovially teasing his younger staff, or soberly treating his ailing mother, Lao Wu is all the more tragic for being perceived by the couple, the police, and us, as some perverted monster.
But the greatest tragedy of all is that, once that twist in perspective is dealt with less than an hour in, we’re left with another hour of padded melodrama, stale performances from the other cast, and an extra twenty minutes of an ‘ending’ which would have been better lopped off well before the other twist limped its way on screen. Not to mention the egregious amount of romance subplots shoved into the film; as Strange Eyes has more unlikely pairings (and sometimes trios) than a Nora Ephron rom-com – minus any of the tact, wit or charm.
Being more likely to slip off the edge of your seat from falling asleep, Stranger Eyes has some great ideas for Hitchcockian thriller, a killer casting for its antagonist and some interesting themes on voyeurism and modern-day parenting. Yet, despite all this promise, director Yeo Siew Hua has no plan for putting it all together, resulting in a lukewarm romance you’d rather nod off to.
Director: Siew Hua Yeo
Cast: Chien-Ho Wu, Kang-sheng Lee, Anicca Panna
Writer: Siew Hua Yeo
Producers: Stefano Centini, Jean-Laurent Csinidis, Alex C. Lo
Composer: Thomas Foguenne
Cinematographer: Hideho Urata
Editor: Jean-Christophe Bouzy