‘Stranger Eyes’ Review: A Haunting Surveillance Drama About Watching—and Not Seeing

Stranger Eyes opens as an enigmatic drama about the disappearance—or possible abduction—of a young girl. It then morphs into a Hitchcockian (or De Palma–esque) suspense piece about watching and being watched, before ultimately revealing itself as a film about the fraught dynamics between parents and children. Along the way, this complex and ambitious Singaporean drama—screened in competition at the Venice Film Festival—maps out a solitary, desolate urban landscape where everyone observes, yet few manage to cross the virtual barrier and truly connect.

The film begins after the kidnapping has already occurred. Junyang (Wu Chien-Ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) have lost their baby, whom they call “Little Bo,” at a playground, and they obsessively review footage from their outings, hoping to find a clue. Nothing yields results, and three months later they are on the brink of resignation. Even the police, in a city blanketed by surveillance cameras, seem to have no leads. No one knows anything about Little Bo, and the couple—who live with his mother—have reached a breaking point that pushes them toward increasingly strange behavior. At one point, Junyang begins following other mothers with babies through shopping malls, getting uncomfortably close.

The mystery appears to take shape when DVDs are slipped under their door, containing footage of the couple both before and after the child’s disappearance. The police soon trace them to Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng, a regular collaborator of Tsai Ming-liang), a neighbor in a building across the street who has been filming them over time. He works as a supervisor at a supermarket the couple frequents, and used to visit with their child. Yet Lao Wu—who lives with his blind mother—insists he knows nothing about what happened to the girl. It is through these videos—and an extended flashback from his perspective—that the case begins to shift, revealing a family situation far more complicated than it initially seemed.

From there, Stranger Eyes continues to layer and entangle its already intricate narrative, but not from a procedural standpoint. In fact, the film shows little interest in solving the case itself—it dispatches the resolution in barely a minute. What matters instead is something more human. What is the nature of this couple’s relationship, both with each other and with parenthood? How deeply has the child’s disappearance affected them—or did some buried desire to abandon her and return to their former lives exist all along? And what drives Lao Wu’s obsessive surveillance? Yeo Siew Hua, the director of A Land Imagined—who, as a curious footnote, lives in Buenos Aires—doesn’t aim to answer these questions so much as to open up new, unsettling ones.

Through footage captured either by Lao Wu or by the omnipresent surveillance cameras, we gradually see that these characters conceal things, lead secret lives, and rarely articulate what they truly think or feel. In almost every instance, technology plays a central role: as a tool for communication, distraction, observation, or even a kind of makeshift therapy. The videos Lao Wu sends are invasive and troubling, certainly, but they also provoke something in the couple. For her, a DJ who livestreams, there’s a strange fascination in having an obsessive watcher. For him, the footage forces uncomfortable questions about his own life.

The film’s final twenty minutes, set after the case has been resolved, are particularly disorienting. At first, they seem to belong to another flashback—or even to a kind of sequel—but gradually reveal themselves as a coda that weaves together the characters’ obsessions, traumas, fears, and regrets. These videos often stand in for human contact, yet they fail to replicate the experience of real connection. There’s something existential that cameras simply cannot capture.

Yeo presents this entire scenario in a clinical, detached manner, closer in spirit to Caché by Michael Haneke, The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola or Blow-Up by Michelangelo Antonioni than to the more overtly suspense-driven films of Alfred Hitchcock (Rear Window) or Brian De Palma (Body Double), which explore similar ideas with very different tones and rhythms. By refusing to lean into traditional thriller mechanics—the police officer here feels more like a therapist than an investigator—Stranger Eyes may frustrate viewers expecting classic suspense with sharp twists. Those twists are present, but they operate beneath the surface of what truly concerns the filmmaker: portraying a world of isolated individuals, disconnected from one another—neighbors, parents and children, husbands and wives, even an entire society. A world in which everyone watches, but very few truly see.