Surveillance thriller about a missing child is the great type of slow burn [Venice]

There are different ways for a movie to pull off a slow burn, but the ones I admire most retain not their stories, but their identities. Strange eyes
Has a straightforward thriller premise and a clear interest in surveillance, both of which are clear from the start, but its form is hardly a straight line. As it leads us around corners in places we didn’t expect to be, what the movie has to say about surveillance slowly comes to mind. For those with the patience to sit through uncertainty, Singaporean director Yeo Siew Hua’s film offers unexpected rewards.

Strange Eyes is built like a traditional thriller

But gradually it evolves into something else

Tragedy has already struck when the film begins. Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) are a young couple reeling over the disappearance of their daughter. Junyang, we know, has been watching her, but in the time it took a short phone call with his mother, Shuping (Vera Chen), little Bo suddenly disappeared. The police told them to sit tight while they investigated, but they were understandably impatient. Shuping took to distributing flyers where she was missing, to the discomfort of local families, now too afraid to play there.

Junyang doesn’t seem to be handling it well. We watch him follow a local mom and her baby girl into a mall and then a children’s toy store. When the mother is distracted, he lifts the child out of her stroller and holds her. The camera seems to follow him sometimes as he does this, his perspective suggesting a real-world point of view. Then, when he gets home, Peiying is watching a DVD someone just slipped under the door, with footage of Junyang and Bo at a grocery store over a year ago. Then they get another one, filmed just that day.

Police officer Zheng (Pete Teo) has cameras set up outside their apartment, although Junyang again tries to take matters into his own hands. Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), a middle-aged man from the building across the street, emerges as a suspect, and we soon start spending a lot more time with him. We learn to what extent he was watching the young family. We learn what he’s seen, some of which shifts the ground under our feet. But the question of what hangs ominously in the air.

The nature of observation is truly unpacked in foreign eyes

Yeo Siew Hua’s film comes to insightful conclusions

Strange eyes Build his web of surveillance little by little. The film makes us aware of the different ways and contexts in which we are recorded: home videos on family members’ phones; Security types in public areas; Livestream we film ourselves; Camcorder shots unknowingly taken in private moments. Yeo then builds the language of observation into the filming, until we begin to obsessively keep track of the camera’s movement and positioning. A monocular scan of apartments recalls Rear window; The discs of secret footage recalled Cache.

Although Little Bo’s recovery still drives the plot, The film becomes less concerned with what all the surveillance can achieve than the effect on the people involved. What does observing and recording someone do to them? In some ways it reveals truths about who they are; In others, it traps pieces of them in amber and mistakes them for the whole. And what about the person observing? The more we learn about the depths of Lao’s voyeurism, the more we see that path opening before Junyang.

For a long time, as the film descends into more and more territory, I wondered if Yeo’s goal was just to complicate our understanding of what it means to see and be seen. But When the story is ready to wrap up, an unexpected fourth act unfolds. At one point, Officer Zeng talks to Junyang about the ubiquity of surveillance. Policing is all about patience now; Criminals always reveal themselves. Watch anyone long enough, he figures, and if they aren’t already a criminal, he will eventually become one.

funny eyes Could have ended with that message and been a good film, but it’s when Yeo decides instead to unpack Zheng’s claim that it becomes a great one. Finally, the relationship between observer and observed is proven to be much more nuanced than it was at the beginning, or as in the policeman’s estimation. In a world where both roles are a defining part of daily life, this movie has found something essential to teach us.

Strange eyes Premiere at the Venice Film Festival in Official Competition. The film is 125 minutes long and has not yet been rated. Although it will have its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 28, the film is not yet scheduled for wide release in the US.