The Interest of Distance: Yeo Discovers the Masochistic Pleasures of a Surveillance State
“Strange feeling that someone is looking at me. I am clear, then dim, then gone, then dim again, then clear again, and so on, back and forth, in and out of someone’s eye.” Samuel Beckett’s passage from Happy Days crystallizes the convoluted intrigue behind Singaporean director Siew Hay Yeo’s sophomore feature Stranger Eyes. Following his 2018 Golden Leopard winning debut A Land Imagined, Yeo once again explores similar themes on the overwhelming presence of absence, and again, a complex investigation of something labyrinthine ensues. A missing child is the jumping off point for the exploration of our innate responses to being observed, or, rather, feeling seen while under a state of constant surveillance, both by our loved ones and those behind eyes in the sky we will never see.… Read the rest
