Singaporean tech thriller ‘Stranger Eyes’ reveals secrets from afar

For Peiying, this means losing herself to the details of the case, and following up on minor threads for long hours. For Junyang, it means retracing his steps on the day Little Bo was taken, but it also means following other young parents around and seeing how close he can come to abducting their children, as though he were trying desperately to enter and understand the mind of the stranger who shattered his family.

Our introduction to the characters paints a stark picture of marital strains between parents who lose a child, whether they're grieving, or searching—or in the case of Stranger Eyes, some combination of both. However we, as the audience, only meet the duo at this particular crossroads, and experience the sliver of their lives defined by tragedy. With the help of Junyang's mother Shuping (Vera Chen), they leave flyers at the local park, and continuously follow up with police officer Zheng (Pete Teo), often to no avail. However, when unmarked DVDs start arriving under their apartment door, containing months-old footage of Junyang being surveilled as he walks Little Bo around a supermarket, their view of the case—and the audience's view of the movie itself—begins to shift, quietly but purposefully, as it follows its characters down unpredictable emotional paths.

These anonymous videos, delivered in blank white envelopes, contain footage shot over several months, of both Peiying and Junyang and before and after Bo's kidnapping, and as the couple goes over the footage (sometimes with Zheng's supervision), they reveal new layers about them. Not only does Junyang's strange, stalker-ish behavior come to light, but so too do hints of infidelity, and the ways in which their marriage may have been unhappy—perhaps even premature—well before it was shaped by tragedy.

Some of these videos are filmed from an apartment across the street, turning one of their neighbors—the lonely, middle-aged Wu (Taiwanese arthouse star Lee Kang-sheng)—into a prime suspect in Bo's disappearance. However, instead of simply following the norms of procedural cinema, Stranger Eyes pushes its central crime into the background in order to focus on Wu's voyeurism, and how and why he came to fixate on the couple in the first place. Just as it seems as though the film might charge headfirst towards answers, it slows down to ruminate on the nature of its questions, and spends lengthy scenes on each respective character's loneliness.

To pull off this tonal and narrative shift, Yeo bridges the gap between camera and subject by letting his performances take control and dictate the movie's pace. He creates, through quietly intimate scenes, a sense of mounting intensity as the story unravels—not through plot revelations, but through a greater understanding of each character, what makes them tick, and what keeps them at an arm's length from other people.

In wanting to be seen, and in wanting to see each other with greater clarity, the film's ensemble delivers beguiling performances that project and introspect all at once.

In wanting to be seen, and in wanting to see each other with greater clarity, the film's ensemble delivers beguiling performances that project and introspect all at once. The finer details of Yeo's social examination aren't presented in verbose and obvious ways, but become intrinsic to his haunting stillness—like the way neither Peiying nor Junyang fully conform to rigid gender expectations, and feel uncomfortable in their skin. As much as their daughter's disappearance may be traumatic, there's something fascinating, perhaps even exciting, about having their darkest secrets on display, as if the video cameras taping them from afar were granting them permission to be themselves—imagery that becomes fascinatingly counterintuitive to the idea that proximity is truth.

The more Stranger Eyes presents these moments of distant surveillance, the more its visual construction resembles Francis Ford Coppola's paranoid surveillance thriller The Conversation, as well as Hitchcock's Rear Window, in which an injured, homebound photojournalist (James Stewart) uses his camera lens to peer into his neighbors' homes. However, these scenes of observations from across the street—of gazing into other people's lives through their windows—now arrive with the added, widespread social experience of living indoors for months on end due to COVID lockdowns. They feel less like an aberration, and more like a familiar norm, the kind that director Mati Diop also captured in his meditative lockdown short In My Room.

Building on this cinematic language also allows Yeo to more comfortably and flexibly craft scenes from this distance, as though he were exploring what living at such a vantage—and at a remove from other people, as well as a fuller understanding of people's self—might do to a person's psyche in a modern, tech-inundated world. The intense pressure of this technological gaze is eventually likened to other forces in the couple's life, like the social expectations of monogamy and parenthood, which may have left them unprepared to properly care for a child in the first place.

That's perhaps the darkest conclusion a kidnapping film could possibly toy with—the idea that one of the worst tragedies a parent could experience can also, in some secret way, be akin to lifting a burden—but Stranger Eyes has much more on its mind than casting aspersions through binary judgment. As it delves deeper into the rich details of its characters' lives, it creates a multifaceted portrait made of hues often hidden out of sight, which can sometimes only be revealed by seeing oneself through other people's eyes.