The Singaporean director speaks about surveillance culture, why we “always need to project some part of our humanity onto what we’re watching”, and his craftily plotted thriller currently on show at the Venice Film Festival
The story of Stranger Eyes‘ journey to the screen began 10 years ago, with a man sitting on a park bench opposite Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua. Observing the stranger sitting across from him, he began to guess his story – what he was doing with his life, who his family were – before his thoughts took an inward turn.
“I realised I was totally projecting my own self onto this guy,” says Yeo, in Venice where his film is screening in competition alongside new work from the likes of Luca Guadagnino and Brady Corbet. “So I’m thinking about that and then I notice that, OK, I’m also being watched by a surveillance camera behind me. I think that was definitely a starting point for me to understand this relationship of constantly being watched. Of watching while being watched.”
A shapeshifting highlight of this year’s festival, Stranger Eyes tells the story of a young Singaporean couple, Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) and Peiying (Annica Panna), who begin receiving mysterious videos of their day-to-day lives after their two-year-old daughter goes missing in the park. When the author of these videos is revealed as a man from a neighbouring tower block, they believe him responsible for their child’s abduction, embarking on an investigation that makes watchers of them all. What follows is a smart, craftily plotted thriller opening out onto a wider discourse on themes that grow more resonant by the day.
Yeo wrote the story a decade ago, but failed to find funding to get his project off the ground. When his feature debut, the ambitious neo-noir A Land Imagined, won top prize at Locarno film festival in 2018, he began reworking his script, reflecting on the ways in which debate around surveillance culture was evolving during the pandemic. “Before [Covid] all the talk was about whether we should allow our privacy to be encroached on by surveillance,” says Yeo. “But then once the pandemic hit it was like, ‘No, you’re socially responsible for surveilling yourself. You need to download this app to make sure we know where you are all the time, who you meet and who you know.’ Now, no one is asking about whether or not there should be surveillance. It’s a moot point, because it’s already here.”
Rather, the question became one of how to negotiate this new reality. For a new generation, says Yeo, “the image has become more real to us than ourselves”, our constant hypervisibility through cameras, phone tracking, metadata and social media forging a new psychogeography of the self. Pushing past his instinctive mistrust of the ways in which privacy was being eroded under the guise of public safety, he concocted a scenario in which the benefits of surveillance culture could not so easily be dismissed: the disappearance of a child. As Officer Zheng, the policeman charged with heading up the case, tells Junyang: “We police don’t need to play hide and seek or go undercover like in the movies any more. Watching is enough.”
The flip side of this coin is that, in this 24/7 surveillance culture, “Even if someone is not a criminal, they’ll turn into one eventually”. It’s an idea that Yeo’s film toys with as it explores motivating factors in its characters’ sometimes bizarre behaviour. Junyang seems aloof and emotionally checked out even before his child goes missing; in one scene, we see him follow a mother and young child into a shopping centre, momentarily lifting the child out of the pram while the mother isn’t looking. And Peiying, a DJ who livestreams her performances for her online followers, is later shown to be exchanging online messages with the couple’s stalker. “I want to be seen,” she tells Lao Wu, in a lonely echo of the popular Gen-Z cri de coeur.
As for Lao Wu, played to haunting perfection by Tsang Mai-Liang regular Lee Kang-Sheng, the question is what motivates this man to pick up a camera and film this family, whose secrets may finally be no worse than our own? Yeo has his own theories on that, but again, much of it comes down to this idea of projection. “What I would say is that watching is never really neutral,” he argues, “because we always need to project some part of our humanity onto what we’re watching.”
If all this sounds a bit philosophical, it’s with good reason: Yeo learned the basics of filmmaking at school but it was only in his 20s, having studied philosophy at the National University of Singapore, that he finally felt like he might have something to say. It’s the teasing existential elements that drive Stranger Eyes, so much so that when the case reaches a conclusion that some may consider an anticlimax, there’s still time for a twist that takes Yeo’s film beyond the realms of genre cinema. “The aftermath is important, because it’s here we start to think about what has come to pass, right?” he says. “For me what’s more interesting is when the plot ends and when real life begins.”