Not quite the Orwellian proxy its programme notes will have you believe, Red Road nevertheless transfers some of 1984’s high anxiety to the present day, where in the wake of London’s subway bombings and a pervading terrorist threat, CCTV outposts cast an eye over every nook and cranny of the urban terrain. In Glasgow, Scotland – a city of conspicuous grayscale malaise – a lonely surveillance operator happens upon a man from her past, first staking him out via a network of cameras at her disposal, before pursuing him directly in a confrontation that turns every rape-revenge movie on its head.

Ostensibly bracketed with the likes of Sliver, Peeping Tom and Hidden, Red Road sure enough investigates leads in voyeurism, Big Brother-ism, and spectatorship, but is less concrete about its findings than its director’s premature comparisons to Michael Haneke suggest. Rather, Andrea Arnold’s CCTV conceit is a high-concept launch pad for a new kind of stalker movie: initially intriguing under the sedation of television monitor glare; then, more involving once its protagonist steps outside of her viewfinder and into the field of play. At the crosshairs of the film’s drama, Katie and Clyde – hunter and prey respectively – may share a liking for arbitrary sex in public places, but remnants of their connected history are otherwise well concealed, with a poker-faced Arnold holding her cards close with all the cunning of an Atom Egoyan reveal. Aesthetically, there’s every chance this material would’ve benefited from the glacial formality of Haneke’s clinical tableaux, yet its floating, hard-edged fidelity draws out an unsightly beauty; chiefly, among the film’s imposing modernist tenements that if not for digital video’s higher definition, wouldn’t look out of place in the bleakest of sci-fi dystopias.

From city to country, further tales of rape-revenge are relayed by another feature film debutant, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo, whose The Night of the Sunflowers takes its thematic cue from Gasper Noè’s notorious but necessary Irreversible. Unfurling a series of unfortunate events in the aftermath of a traumatic sexual assault, the film considers not only the blindness of revenge, but also the unending domino effect that violence invariably spurs. Of some curiosity is whether Sánchez-Cabezudo intends his cyclical tragedy as a metaphor for broader current events – say the tit-for-tat warring of nations and their blast radius of collateral damage – as the film’s circumstances play out like another hurried and unsanctioned retaliation against heinous attack. Unlikely political readings aside, this a consummate thriller by any standard, propelling its portioned narrative like an incremental chain reaction, with various doomed characters providing the links in a tiered murder plot of mistaken identity. It is, however, much less of a neo-noir than its criminal element insinuates: blessed with an idyllic Spanish rural setting, there’s little ominous or shadowy to be drawn from a provincial village bathed in European sun.

Back to Red Road’s George Orwell murmurings, where remnants of the author’s totalitarian state continue to pertain: in Eye in the Sky, the city of Hong Kong also comes under close scrutiny. But Yau Nai-hoi, another first-time director working under auspices of Johnnie To’s Milkyway productions (To’s own baby, Exiled, also screens this festival), is even less concerned with the politics of privacy and surveillance, while his film’s titular ‘eye in the sky’ is really ground-level and very hands on. The former British colony’s bustling streets provide ample cover for a special division stakeout unit trailing an elusive crew of jewelry thieves in this efficient, tersely orchestrated policier which borrows liberally from 24’s mission control management of crack field teams – minus the gun-toting posturing and Kevlar vests. There are no grey areas in this black and white thriller – it is genre executed with ease in the best Milkyway tradition – and has the configuration down pat. Visually though, it earns bonus points for its rather complex mise-en-scene of inconspicuous camera angles choreographed across Hong Kong’s labyrinthine cityscape.—Tim Wong