Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua, 2024).
“Some people aren’t meant to be parents.” It’s a phrase we’ll hear twice in Yeo Siew Hua’s Stranger Eyes (2024)—and it’s a sentiment we might come to share as we follow the family at the center of the film. Young parents Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna) live with Junyang’s mother in a large apartment complex in Singapore, where Junyang works a shift job at an ice-skating rink and Peiying is a livestreamer. Their toddler daughter, Bo, has vanished from a playground three months prior to the events of the film. Since Bo’s disappearance, Peiying has spent hours rewatching family videos, hoping that she’ll notice some minor detail in her phone’s camera roll that will help her solve Bo’s kidnapping. When the family begins to receive DVDs sent by someone who has evidently been stalking them for months, they think they might finally have a lead. They’re skeptical when Zheng, the aloof detective responsible for the case, concludes that their stalker, Wu (Lee Kang-sheng), is not a person of interest in the kidnapping.
It’s Junyang, not Bo, who is the subject of Wu’s footage. The first tape Junyang and Peiying receive frames in close-up a scene we have just witnessed: after a young mother refuses to take a missing-child poster from him at the playground, Junyang follows her through a mall, touching her hair as she boards an escalator and even picking up her child when she has her back turned. Though we do not see Wu, the point of view of his footage reveals that he was standing just outside of Yeo’s initial frame.
This dual act of social transgression by Wu and Junyang reveals the psychological parallels between these two seemingly unlike men. Wu continues to send his recordings, revealing more of Junyang’s bad behavior—in one, taken before the kidnapping, Junyang ignores Bo as she cries; in another he flagrantly cheats on Peiying. In contrast, Peiying’s tender home videos offer little insight into the family’s inner workings. Wu’s access to the couple’s private life invites us to join him in judgment of their fitness as parents.
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005).
Yeo has said he didn’t see Caché (2005) until after he had started working on Stranger Eyes. Michael Haneke’s film wrestles with similar anxieties about being watched and the long-term social ramifications of surveillance. Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne Laurent (Juliette Binoche) are an affluent intellectual couple with a preteen son, living a busy but uncomplicated cosmopolitan life. The couple receives a tape that at first seems like a bizarre practical joke—a two-hour static shot of the front of their apartment, devoid of people until Georges briefly passes through. Subsequent packages arrive, each one a deeper invasion of privacy and increasingly revelatory of Georges’s past. The mail triggers Georges to reflect on someone from his youth he had nearly forgotten: Majid, an Algerian boy orphaned by a police massacre, whom his parents would have adopted had it not been for Georges’s sabotage. The relationship between Georges and Majid is positioned as microcosmic of France’s long history of unacknowledged violence against Algeria. Georges’s refusal to confront his mistakes will finally fracture his family. When he eventually reveals to Anne that he believes Majid is behind the tapes, she is devastated not by his actions as a child, but by his secrecy as an adult.
It becomes increasingly difficult in Caché to distinguish between the stalker’s footage and Haneke’s. Its aesthetic is typical Haneke: the camera generally keeps still, with occasional pans and sparing use of handheld work. There is no non-diegetic music, and Georges’s back is often to the camera. Haneke’s compositions feel natural and occasionally awkward in their realism, not carefully constructed. Georges’s last memory of young Majid even resembles the surveillance footage: we watch, from the shadows, a wide shot of Majid refusing to get in the car that will take him from the family—and of Georges’s parents walking away from the boy they had pledged to care for. By blurring the line between these two modes of storytelling, Caché aligns us with the voyeur, placing us in a position to compare the story Georges has been telling himself about Majid with the one we unravel through his memories and the tapes.
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005).
Similarly, the tapes in Stranger Eyes manifest the parental guilt that Junyang is unable, or unwilling, to feel. He chooses silence even when confronted with the evidence of his negligent parenting. “Some people aren’t meant to be parents” is an insult freely lobbed by both Junyang’s and Wu’s mothers at other women, but it’s likely that the same has been leveled at them behind their backs—their sons work menial jobs and barely engage with the world around them; neither could be said to be thriving. Wu develops an online flirtation with Peiying through her livestreamed DJ sets. Though Wu’s intentions in sharing his recordings aren’t made explicit, his fascination with the family seems to stem from his estrangement from his own adult daughter whom he’s been recording from a distance for years.
These three men—Junyang, Wu, and Georges—are terrified not only of how others might perceive them but of any introspection. They are comfortable only when in total control of how they are viewed: Junyang livestreams himself flirting with another woman to torment Peiying. Wu’s social interactions occur only behind the anonymity of a screen. Georges edits his literary talk show to highlight superficial agreements between the guests and cuts out thornier points of contention. Though Stranger Eyes maintains a clearer formal separation between the non-diegetic camera and the surveillance footage than Caché does, its scenes replicate the quiet, claustrophobic feeling of Wu’s tapes through sparse dialogue and long stretches of ambient silence. The formal coldness of the film is matched by its icy portrayal of grief: while Peiying and Junyang’s mother are visibly devastated by Bo’s disappearance, Junyang is so repressed he barely emotes, never speaking more than a few words at a time. He never attempts to justify his actions in the footage Wu has captured, nor does he express, to others or to himself, his blatant unhappiness and frustration. Like Wu, he eventually finds it easier to watch, rather than engage with, the world around him.
Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua, 2024).
In both films, the mystery of who is sending these recordings and why is ultimately a red herring. The sender is a proxy for the audience, implicating us in the culture of surveillance and alienation. We are placed behind the camera alongside these anonymous stalkers and gain access to their subjects’ hidden pasts and seamy presents.
Junyang and Peiying are already isolated based on their class status: the declining birthrate and an increasing wealth gap in Singapore, as in many industrialized nations, have left working-class parents without resources for economic or social growth. They don’t have the depth of community or wealth of the Laurents, and Bo’s disappearance has strained what is left of their already fractured relationship. “He saw me,” Peiying says to explain her bond with Wu. “Not as the image I presented to fans online. And not just as a mother.” Accustomed to being on camera in her livestreams, she develops another relationship rooted in voyeurism. Even when Wu invites her to visit the grocery store where he works after hours, the two never physically meet. Instead, she puts on a manic performance, impishly rearranging the food displays and playing with the fruit stands, for him to watch through the security camera. She struggles as much as Wu and Juyang with social isolation, but her emotional bond with her daughter had been keeping her from total alienation.
Released two decades after Caché, Stranger Eyes is representative of a major cultural shift in camera usage. Caché is an important timestamp in the history of video, as well as in Haneke’s interest in the ethics of film. Haneke’s second film, Benny’s Video (1992), is an early distillation of a thesis that runs throughout his corpus: an indictment of a society that has encouraged social disaffection through an isolating and violent media culture, in particular the disinterested, upper-crust parents who have allowed the next generation’s antisocial behavior to fester. These ideas permeate Haneke’s career, from the sociopathic home invaders of Funny Games (1997, 2007) who can rewind reality with a remote control, to Eve of Happy End (2017) who casually records herself poisoning her mother. His preoccupations are dramatic, but prescient. In their continual emphasis on moments of depravity, his films are a productive foil for cultural desensitization to constant surveillance and violent media.
Peiying and Junyang aren’t inherently uncomfortable with preserving their intimate moments on film. It’s on video, when they’re performing for an invisible audience, that we see them most animated and social, whether it’s in the family videos, during Peiying’s DJ sets and her supermarket flirtation with Wu, or when Junyang livestreams his date with another woman. In 2005, this dynamic would have been bizarre but in 2025, it's mundane to the point of cliche. The cultural effect of widespread acceptance of surveillance is expressed in Stranger Eyes as familiar, slow-growing alienation rather than Haneke’s bursts of extreme violence. What initially rattles the couple is the physical container of the DVD, an obsolescent home-video format. They already know they’re being constantly recorded, even when they’re not the ones pressing the button. But they don’t expect to be reminded of the level of surveillance they’ve tacitly agreed to, or to see longform, close-up footage of themselves outside of their own social-media profiles.
Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua, 2024).
Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world, as well as one of the most heavily surveilled. More than 90,000 police cameras, or “PolCams,” have been installed since 2016. The Ministry of Home Affairs attributes the 50 percent decrease in crimes like theft, vandalism, and property damage over the last few years to the extensive surveillance network; it plans to build a network of 200,000 PolCams across Singapore’s 284 square miles (an area smaller than New York City). Even in places without this level of surveillance infrastructure, we are constantly showing up in the background of strangers’ Ring cameras, live streams, and TikToks.
Such omnipresent surveillance prevents Stranger Eyes’ characters from emotionally engaging in the physical world. Though we don’t actually see Wu make his recordings, we do see the enormous archive of DVDs that he has painstakingly maintained. Obsessive voyeurism is Wu’s substitute for fatherhood, a maladapted form of caretaking for an isolated age. Junyang’s demonstrated disinterest in his daughter sparks Wu’s initial obsession. He stalks Junyang to understand himself. The surveillance of others is his only mode of self-reflection.
It’s fitting that the clearest emotional expression from any of the film’s male characters is found in a tape that Junyang delivers to Wu’s daughter: Wu has captured her celebrating a birthday and, unlike any of the other footage we’ve seen, recorded a voice-over. In the longest piece of sustained dialogue in the movie, he mourns his absence, apologizes for his failures as a parent, and wishes her a joyful life. It’s the only time we see a father fully understand his role in his willing alienation from his family. It has taken years of estrangement but Wu recognizes himself in the adage the audience has now heard twice—“some people aren’t meant to be parents.” Wu has evolved through his observation of Junyang, but the opposite does not appear to be true. In the film’s final scene, Junyang watches Bo and Peiying from a distance, his transformation into the removed, paternal voyeur complete.
Caché was an examination of the anxieties of a society in the early stages of a new culture of compulsory video surveillance; twenty years later, Stranger Eyes is an exploration of that culture, arrived, mutated, and embraced. If there’s a crime at the center of the film, it’s not Bo’s kidnapping, which is solved offscreen, but the creation and proliferation of a surveillance state that is inherently, predictably alienating. “Does having a camera make someone a suspect?” Officer Zheng dryly remarks. It depends on the charges.