A film by Yeo Siew Hua
With: Wu Chien-Ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Pete Teo, Xenia Tan, Maryanne Ng-Yew, Mila Troncoso
After the mysterious disappearance of their baby daughter, a young couple receives strange videos and realizes someone has been filming their daily life — even in their most intimate moments. The police set up surveillance around their home to catch the voyeur but the family starts to crumble as secrets unravel under the scrutiny of eyes watching them from all sides.
Our opinion: ***
A cinema very close to to that of early Haneke, meticulous, very precise, very studied, which takes care of its frames and proposes a very progressive narration, which maintains a mystery and a permanent tension. Clever, very clever indeed, Yeo Siew Hua interrogates a set-up, quickly blurring the lines, while at the same time – and the art lies in this – spinning out an impeccable logic. The atmosphere created, which uses and abuses the back-and-forth between an exterior setting – the investigation, the action – and a more intimate, interior setting – the main suspect’s home videos, fuels a perceptive, dynamic and intelligent psychological thriller. The only fly in the ointment is that, once the main plot seems to have been solved, and what would have seemed to us to be a nice ending, a variation of it kicks in, intended to prolong the initial effect, but which, on the contrary, through an effect of overflow and one-upmanship, departs from the Hanekian universe, discrediting almost all the qualities of patience and parsimony that the author had demonstrated up to now, to offer us pseudo-enigmatic maxims such as we find in plethora of second-rate thrillers. Had it not been for this youthful error, Stranger Eyes would have been our Golden Lion in this year’s relatively weak competition.