STRANGER EYES - Mark Reviews Movies

Stranger Eyes, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

Writer/director Yeo Siew Hua's Stranger Eyes begins as the mystery of the disappearance and likely abduction of a baby. That premise alone makes it compelling, as well as harrowing, enough, but as the story unravels and reveals more, the filmmaker assembles a different kind of puzzle—one about the hidden layers of its central characters.

The baby, called Little Bo, is the child of married couple Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna). They live in an apartment in Singapore, one owned and recently renovated for the additional family members by Junyang's mother Shuping (Vera Chen). She recorded the last known footage of the girl, because her parents don't believe that a child's private life should be plastered all over social media.

That's what Peiying says, at least, but even a detail as small or a rationale as understandable as that becomes one worthy of inspection here. After all, not taking and/or posting photos of one's child could be seen as responsible parenting in an increasingly online world, but it could also point toward something about the way those parents perceive their child. It's all a matter of interpretation, based on what, in this case, an outsider sees, knows, and assumes about a stranger.

We soon learn that someone has been watching Junyang, Peiying, and Little Bo for some amount of time. After the baby goes missing, the police are stumped, because the father, who was on a phone call with his mother and looked away for a brief amount of time when the toddler went to some play equipment at a local park, says he didn't see anything. No one else at the park witnessed anything out of the ordinary, either. While the cops have the family looking at any personal photographs or videos that might reveal some clue, a DVD arrives at the apartment.

Someone recorded Junyang at a grocery store, with his then-younger daughter sitting in the shopping cart. While the couple watches that, Shuping comes home to find another disc waiting at the door. It's from that very day, when the father, seeing a baby who looks a lot like his missing daughter, followed a mother and her child through the mall.

The mystery of Yeo's film, then, isn't simply about what happened to Little Bo, where she is now, and who may have kidnapped her. It is also and with increasing importance about how these characters behave and what those actions could say about them. We know, for example, that Junyang picked up the baby at the mall while the mother was distracted, but the footage ends before that happened. Does the man discover that this isn't his daughter, or since he's still staring at the child later, does it suggest he can't know for certain?

The film's own sense of perspective, reflected in how cinematographer Thomas Foguenne use different cameras and captures characters illuminated by screens projecting their own actions, is fascinating. It keeps shifting—from this distanced view of anxiety and obsession and the procedure of trying to determine what happened to the baby, to the viewpoint of the man behind that camera, to someone who desperately wants to comprehend why a stranger would find the lives of some anonymous family of such keen interest. Each step along the way seems to confirm some things, only to shatter them entirely. People are, after all, more complicated than what another can assume of them from brief observations of little moments.

The man behind the camera capturing those moments of the family's lives is named Wu (Lee Kang-Sheng). Without saying too much about matters of the plot itself, he lives in a building across the street, in an apartment with a direct view of the family's, with his ailing mother (played Maryanne Ng-Yew). In theory, all of these details would make him the prime suspect in the disappearance of Little Bo, and without saying one way or another if that actually is the case, Yeo both gives us reason to suspect that must be the truth and, in quite an unsettling way, to understand why he would have motive to do so. It's less about him and more about what he has seen of Junyang and Peiying from his remote encounters with them.

What might seem to be a straightforward answer to the central mystery, in other words, only raises more questions: about the kind of parent Junyang is, how Peiying's insistence that her child doesn't appear online could be misconstrued as something else, and why this man, who lives an ordinary but lonely life, would become obsessed with the parenting practices of a pair of complete strangers. The screenplay provides ideas as blunt as Junyang ignoring his crying daughter to a negligent extreme, as well as what the stalker sees of the man's most private moments, and hints as subtle as Wu's mother mentioning that there once was someone else in her son's life.

All of the pieces are here, essentially, but even if we might end up a few steps ahead of Yeo's precise construction of when and how those components are assembled, the filmmaker displays much skill in piecing them together. Beyond that, the story becomes one of considerable compassion, even for characters whose actions are as irresponsible as Junyang's and of an open-ended degree of criminality, as Wu's clearly are.

To be sure, Yeo's screenplay neglects a few significant characters, mainly Peiying and Shuping, in the process. As it becomes clear that the filmmaker has a specific story to tell, Stranger Eyes reveals a very particular and shared shortcoming or failure of certain characters. Up to a point, the plot may be about a missing child, but the real story here is about parents realizing they might have lost a child in a much different way.

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