‘Stranger Eyes’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Yeo Siew Hua. Singapore/France/Taiwan/US. 2024. 126mins

Singapore ranks excessive on the worldwide scale of cities with the densest focus of CCTV cameras. Following on from his 2018 Locarno Golden Leopard winner A Land Imagined, Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua weaves an intriguing if considerably cold human drama out of life in an city fishbowl during which police surveillance, webcams, retail retailer safety cameras and plain outdated analogue voyeurism are fixed presences. A narrative that begins out with the disappearance of a two-year-old woman means that being too intensely watched can have a identity-dissolving impact.

By no means lower than intriguing, even when it doesn’t all add up

Enjoying in competitors in Venice – a primary for a Singaporean title – Stranger Eyes is a movie that has its longueurs, particularly because it drifts away from the stress of the lacking youngster quest into one thing else solely. But it surely’s by no means lower than intriguing, even when it doesn’t all add up. Destined for additional pageant play, Yeo’s third fictional characteristic also needs to nuzzle into some arthouse berths, helped alongside maybe by the presence of actor Lee Kang-sheng, know for his work with Tsai Ming-liang.

Colors are washed out, intense solely of their neon or LED manifestations, in a Singapore whose outdoors areas appear as closed-in because the interiors. It is a place that suffers from fixed slippage between actual areas and digital areas, and between what’s actual, what’s digital, and what’s dreamed. The courtyard of a residential block, the residences that line it, a youngsters’s playground, a police station stuffed with glass cubicle rooms and the huge array of reside surveillance digicam footage that fill an entire wall of that police station induce a sort of existential vertigo that turns into the leitmotiv of this poised, elegiac, cerebral movie.

Persistence is required initially to maneuver previous a premise that by no means feels solely emotionally grounded, given its severity. A pair of their twenties, Junyan (Wu Chien-ho) and Pei-ying (Anicca Panna) have misplaced their two-year-old daughter, Little Bo: she was kidnapped three months beforehand when Junyan turned briefly distracted as she was enjoying in an area park. Junyan’s live-in mom Shu-ping (Vera Chen), a former dancer, remains to be handing out flyers, however her son and daughter-in-law appear numbed. Hope is revived after they start to obtain a sequence of DVDs from a mysterious supply.

Lee Kang-sheng is hypnotic as Wu, a middle-aged grocery store supervisor who lives along with his aged mom in a flat straight throughout from the grieving couple. Her eyes aren’t good, however her misplaced and lonely son makes up for mum in continually utilizing his personal– to spy on the neighbours on the opposite facet of the courtyard, to test on the workers and clients the place he works, to talk anonymously on-line with Pei-ying as she reside video-streams her dwelling DJ classes, which Wu can see each on his display and from his window. 

It’s the festive season in an equatorial metropolis that has to fabricate winter – but it surely all feels as pretend because the tinkly travesty of Beethoven’s ’Fur Elise’ that we hear at one level emanating from a toyshop show. Junyan works at an ice rink in a mall that additionally encompasses a full-scale toboggan run. Or is that in one other a part of town? In Stranger Eyes, areas don’t be a part of up. It’s on this artificially frozen panorama that the movie’s feelings will start to thaw, in a manner that’s each neat and just a bit trite. However this odd journey is distinct and resonant sufficient for that to not matter an excessive amount of.