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Review | Venice 2024: Stranger Eyes movie review – unsettling Singaporean drama about surveillance
Yeo Siew Hua muses over Singapore’s use of security cameras in his voyeuristic anti-thriller about surveillance of a missing child’s parents
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3.5/5 stars
Voyeurism and surveillance take centre stage in Singapore director Yeo Siew Hua’s slow-burning film.
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Unveiled in the competition strand of this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Stranger Eyes can sit comfortably alongside such classic voyeuristic thrillers as Rear Window, Blow Up and The Conversation, even if it never quite touches any of those masterpieces.
A film that unfolds gradually, you would be hard-pressed to call it a thriller; an anti-thriller might be more appropriate, given the way Yeo toys with our expectations.
The film begins with a couple looking at images of their child, Little Bo. This could be delightful home-video footage, but it takes on new meaning as we learn the girl has gone missing in a Singapore park.
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Worse still, somebody is filming the couple’s intimate moments at home and tormenting them by sending DVDs (a very old-school format, it is noted). Of course, this feels like a cinephile’s dream, evoking memories of Michael Haneke’s Hidden and David Lynch’s Lost Highway.
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