by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Wu Chien-ho, Anicca Panna, Lee Kang-Sheng
Intro:
... establishes the same intimacy between the audience and the characters as it does between the characters themselves.
Cinema, by its very nature, is voyeuristic. Not necessarily in its strict sexualised definition, but the act of finding some form of entertainment in watching others is inherent to the art form. In critical circles, there will always be debates about whether a given story was ‘intended’ to present a certain idea or a certain slant on a certain idea, but intentionally or otherwise, all films serve as commentary on the act of voyeurism just through their sheer existence. So, when a film actively sets out to make a film with the act of seeing as its crux, it has to go further than the medium’s baseline in order to make its point.
Stranger Eyes from Singaporean writer/director Yeo Siew Hua is a mystery thriller with voyeurism and surveillance as its core ideas, following young couple Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) who, after their daughter goes missing, start to receive mysterious DVDs in their mail of someone filming them from afar.
Incorporating the involvement of the police (who set up their own surveillance to catch the DVD deliverer in an odd moment of duelling invasions of privacy) and even live-streaming on Twitch into the narrative, the film asks questions about the difference between being watched and being seen.
However, while the shots from Hua and DP Hideho Urata do a lot to establish an icy and distant mood, the actual footage mainly results in people watching people watching people. For as many ideas that float around the frame concerning relationships between people and how much they truly know about each other, the slow-burn-without-the-burn pacing can make this quite a trudge to get through. It doesn’t help that the film’s two major plot developments (who is behind the DVDs and where is the missing daughter) end up landing without a lot of impact, with the former leading to even more scenes of people watching people in dead silence, and the latter coming across as if they just plumb forgot about that plot point and decided to add a little ‘by the way’.
While the initial involvement of law enforcement shows potential for interesting commentary on the nature of surveillance states, the film ends up showing the entire practice in a positive light, highlighting that things seen but not understood is still better than things unseen. To say nothing of how it presents filming strangers without consent, which aims for a warped kind of sentimentality but just leaves the whole product with a distinctly off taste.
Stranger Eyes is an idea box covered in layers upon layers of unfortunately plain wrapping. The performances are good and the distinct mood helps convey the feeling of disconnect that every major character shares, but at two hours, its cyclical routine of following those who follow others ends up doing far more to utilise and normalise the practice than it does to comment on the hows and whys behind it. At best, it establishes the same intimacy between the audience and the characters as it does between the characters themselves. At worst, it’s like a screed about how privacy is overrated, actually.
