A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Saturday, August 1, 2026

Stranger Eyes (Yeo Siew Hua, 2024)

Lee Kang-sheng in Stranger Eyes

Cast: Wu Chien-ho, Lee Kang-sheng, Anicca Panna, Vera Chen, Xenia Tan, Pete Teo, Maryanne Ng-Yu, Anya Chow. Screenplay: Yeo Siew Hua. Cinematography: Hideho Urata. Production design: James Page. Film editing: Jean-Christophe Bouzy. Music: Thomas Foguenne. 

In Stranger Eyes, Yeo Siew Hua attempts a deconstruction of the missing child thriller to make a comment on voyeurism and video surveillance. As we're trying to figure out how and why Little Bo disappeared and follow the attempts of her parents to find her, we're also thrust back into the life of the chief suspect, Lao Wu (Lee Kang-sheng). It turns out that well before their child vanished, he has been spying on Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), who live across from him in a Singapore high-rise. Eventually we're thrust into a web of motives and secret relationships documented on a variety of cameras. The narrative scrambling that lifts Stranger Eyes out of the routine keeps the viewer off base, but it also becomes a distraction, calling attention as much to the way the story is told as to the story itself and its implications for a world in which privacy is an illusion.  


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