The surveillance thriller “Alone With Her,” which makes its premiere today at the IFC Center and on cable, wants to do for your entire life what “Psycho” did for showers. First-time filmmaker Eric Nicholas flubs his elaborate setup, rather like the film’s doughy stalker, but the confined perspective of his spycam method of shooting does bring on a low-grade Michael Haneke-style anxiety.

Doug (Colin Hanks, son of Tom) is the young nobody who wants to have somebody. Amy (Ana Claudia Talancón) is his hapless target, an aspiring painter recovering from a breakup. Doug’s perverse courtship gets underway when he breaks into Amy’s apartment and plants spycams everywhere. See Doug watch Amy. See Doug use inside information to manufacture a meet-cute at the coffee shop.

“Run, Amy, run” should come next, but portrayed as shy and vulnerable, she overlooks the consistent coincidences and her own intuition and gives Doug a chance. They like the same obscure band and he saw and loved the same weepie on television last night; he calls her seconds after she trips and falls at home. Her sassy best friend (Jordana Spiro) is more suspicious, but Doug gains Amy’s trust by consoling her at her worst moments, half of which he has engineered.

From there, “Alone With Her” veers into the typical cinematic extremes of stalker behavior (drugging, stealing dogs), yet the controlled photography induces an effective claustrophobia. Most shots are fixed and bounded as if taken from the perspective of Doug’s spycams, toggling among his hundred electronic eyes. Eventually, Mr. Nicholas throws rigor out the window (and from time to time abandons an ostentatious datetime stamp), but the finger-curling feeling of entrapment holds up regardless.

Of course, surveillance is an old plot gambit in movies, and voyeurism, as critics are always saying, is a part of moviegoing itself. To some extent, the novelty of “Alone With Her” is upstaged by the numbing peepscape of reality TV shows and Webcams. The spycam horror movie feels more inevitable than timely, suitable for a chart depicting the evolution of a zeitgeist through avant-garde art to ad campaign to the various budget grades of movies. (If anything, the film’s dubious claim to fame may be in introducing so-called upskirt photography to the big screen.)

“Alone With Her” works best in traditional terms by enforcing the nerve-wracking dramatic irony of horror movies’ unblinking vigilance (“Don’t open the closet! Or do … anything!”). Given no alternative, we become helpless witnesses in Doug’s perverse invasion. It’s like being forced to surrender to a surrogate filmmaker as Doug stages encounters with his quarry.

Ms. Talancón is superb at non-acting under the eye of the spycams, puttering about her apartment or singing in the shower. Intentionally or not, she and Mr. Hanks make an amusing pair. Mr. Hanks, the self-conscious progeny of a bland matinee star, attempts a concertedly anti-charismatic expedition into indie films, while Ms. Talancón, a telenovela star in Mexico, plays an anonymous, unself-conscious screen victim.

Because of the voyeuristic setup, Mr. Hanks appears on screen less than his co-star, at least until Doug finds ways to meet Amy in her apartment. His mildness befits the character’s preheated pickup moves, but he struggles as the movie ramps up. For what it’s worth, based upon a rambling sequence in which Doug first finds Amy, Mr. Hanks is capable at operating a camera hidden in a bag.

“Alone With Her” rushes its endgame, even though it doesn’t even crack 80 minutes. Perhaps to offset any vicarious thrill of the chase, the film is framed by a quotation from a law enforcement official about the scourge of stalking created by cheap surveillance technology. The film might better deliver on this true-crime promise by sticking to its creepily plausible early stretches of social engineering. Such orchestrated sympathies are familiar to anyone who’s been a victim of Google stalking.