The Singaporean writer and director's third feature uses genre cues as a starting point for a moving, atmospheric reflection on social isolation and alienation.

At first, it seems like a premise shamelessly lifted from Michael Haneke’s “Caché”: A couple is distraught when an unmarked DVD arrives in their mailbox, and upon playing it, they discover footage of themselves being unwittingly filmed as they go about their daily business. But just as Haneke’s film took an effective domestic horror premise and thrust it into tricky sociopolitical territory, the slick, shape-shifting psychodrama “Stranger Eyes” also has more on its mind than just the question of who’s watching whom. By resolving a mystery unexpectedly quickly before delving into the deeper, more searching uncertainties of human behavior and relationships, Singaporean writer-director Yeo Siew Hua’s third feature gradually reveals a broken heart beneath its slick, cold veneer.

Yeo’s previous feature, the fluorescent neo-noir “A Land Imagined,” put him on the map as an auteur by winning the top prize at Locarno in 2018, and announced — following his more experimental 2009 debut, “In the House of Straw” — an affinity for genre-bending stories with tricky time-hopping structures and a measure of social conscience. Shimmeringly atmospheric and elegantly nonlinear, “Stranger Eyes” follows that trajectory, though it’s a more accomplished and enjoyable film, prioritizing character and feeling over complicated narrative gymnastics. If “A Land Imagined” was notable enough to score a multi-territory Netflix deal, Yeo’s latest should garner at least as much international attention after its competition premiere in Venice.

The densely populated island nation of Singapore makes a good setting for a story about surveillance and private lives made public, given the challenges of being truly invisible in such an environment. Junyang (Wu Chien-ho) and Peiying (Anicca Panna), the young couple at the center of the film, live in a kind of enormous, grid-like high-rise, opposite another enormous, grid-like high-rise, which lends itself to “Rear Window”-style curtain-raising on a positively industrial scale. Even at home, they’re not alone, sharing their quarters with Junyang’s mother Shuping (Vera Chen) and their baby daughter Bo — a busy arrangement, though not unusual in this cramped society, that has pushed Junyang and Peiying’s relationship into fragile territory.