Rating: NR | Runtime: 125 minutes
Release Date: November 15th, 2024 (Taiwan) / August 29th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Anticipate Pictures / Film Movement
Director(s): Yeo Siew Hua
Writer(s): Yeo Siew Hua

I think some people are better off not having children.

Surveillance is at the heart of Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes. The voyeurism of an unknown entity capturing intimate moments of Junyang (Chien-Ho Wu) and Peiying’s (Anicca Panna) lives before leaving DVD copies under their door. Government, corporate, and private security cameras running 24/7 from carefully measured perches. The voluntary decision to broadcast ourselves via livestreams and social media. Privacy as a concept has been so eroded with the rapid advancement of technology that we’ve unwittingly hammered in the last nail ourselves to make an attempt at maintaining some semblance of control.

The opening scene provides a perfect example of the overlap as Junyang’s mother Shuping (Vera Chen) giddily captures her granddaughter with her cellphone. Is her doting a means of archiving history for the toddler’s future use? Or is it simply for herself as a means to show off to her own “following” by posting videos online now? Peiying is quick to request she not put these moments on the internet because Little Bo deserves to make that decision herself when she’s older. The line that separates ease from necessity is thin. A proud grandma can show her love to the world with the press of a button. But should she?

Enter Officer Zheng (Pete Teo) and his entertainingly patronizing tone when dealing with Junyang, Peiying, and Shuping upon Bo’s disappearance. He begs them to let the police do their job sifting through clues with patience because he knows that same technology has made civilians think they can do what detectives do better and faster. So, he rubs it in their faces when half-baked plans to do just that blow up in their faces and laughs to himself about the reality that hiding has become impossible. Surveillance is simply too prolific for anyone to believe they can commit a crime without getting caught.

The problem is our definition of a crime in relation to that shifting bar of privacy. Is Lao Wu (Kang-sheng Lee) committing one when filming Junyang at a mall without his permission? Maybe. I guess it really depends on what he does with the footage. Broadcasting it would be. Blackmailing the subject with it would be. But keeping it for himself? Things become grayer. Especially when one could construe the footage he’s captured is of Junyang committing crimes himself. When does a stalker become a Good Samaritan? The moment their loathsome behavior inexplicably proves beneficial to the victim’s needs.

Because what if we discover Lao Wu’s objective creep didn’t take Bo? The shift from finding him disgusting to potentially discovering that he can be a hero due to his stalking capturing the real kidnapper would give whiplash to even the strongest neck. Welcome to a world moving way too fast to be able to fully process stakes and consequences without proper hindsight and context. It’s why Teo’s cop can be the comic relief to the drama rather than an immovable voice of authority. In the past, victims had no alternative but to wait. Now, they often make cases harder via their amateurish meddling.

But that’s just one angle that Yeo takes with Stranger Eyes. It’s not even the main one despite our assumption being that Bo would take precedence above everything else. No, the script is more interested in how our self-imposed surveillance states allow us to both find escape from our troubles and create new ones. It’s about the parallels between Junyang and Lao Wu as fathers with the latter following the former less as a means to punish him by exposing his transgressions than to prevent him from making the same mistakes he did. It’s Junyang and Peiying’s attempts to reconcile parenthood with independence.

One engages in physical affairs. The other in an emotional one. Why? To be seen as more than a husband or wife or mom or dad. To be seen as free and unencumbered. To flirt. To create. And through those pursuits you have Lao Wu as the voyeur witnessing it all—clandestinely with Junyang and publicly with Peiying courtesy of her streams (I can’t tell if the static chat feed means no one else is watching or that the filmmakers didn’t realize those interfaces are constantly in motion beyond the main video feed). It might feel weird to acknowledge, but he’s kind of their victim too.

My sole issue with the film is that we do heavily invest in Bo and the fact that she becomes a MacGuffin makes it difficult to fully appreciate the reasons why. The epilogue helps in this regard (Act One is from Junyang’s perspective, Act Two from Lao Wu’s, and Act Three the culmination of their secretive interactions with each other) by driving home the aforementioned parallels with dialogue, a pivot to security cam perspectives, and Xenia Tan’s Ling Po, but it’s still strange to totally disengage from a missing child mystery. Despite the resulting disorientation, the overarching theme and complex characterizations do prevail.

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Chien-Ho Wu in STRANGER EYES; courtesy of Film Movement.