Observance (2016)

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A Masterpiece!

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Although there was so much promise to this movie, the director left out so much information as to what was going on. Comparing it to Rear Window is a criticism of Rear Window. Too many pieces of incident that didn't connect. Why was he getting sick. Why was he throwing up 'tar', as it were. Why is he even monitoring this woman? Who was the child? Why go back and forth to the ocean view and chat with his friend? What's with the jar on the shelf? Who was the male visitor? Just not good enough for me to watch again to pick up what I missed...and I always miss something in movies that I watch more than once. Why end the movie the way he did? Sorry....thumbs down!

Following the death of his son and wife's refusal to talk to him, Parker (Lindsay Farris) takes on a task as a private investigator. He lives in a dump of an apartment as he watches the blonde (Stephanie King) across the street. He descends into madness (or whatever was happening) as he spies on the woman who has an abusive relationship with her fiancé (Tom O'Sullivan). In addition to weird occurrences happening in his apartment, Parker becomes physically ill as he discovers there is something else at play...an offering? Does it relate to the past? the doctor? Who the heck knows, the film didn't give me closure. Almost as confusing as that Jake Gyllenhaal thing (Enemy).Guide: F-word, brief sex. Nudity? Ummm...she lived in apartment 126. He is across the street in 128. Shouldn't one side be an odd number? Just observing.

Much is made about the fact that the movie "Observance" was made on a budget of about $11,000. Frankly, in my opinion, the budget shows. The production values actually look surprisingly good for such a low- budget entry, and that explains a lot. All the money and effort was expended to produce a film that LOOKED reasonably good in spite of a shoestring budget, and so no money was spent elsewhere, like, say, writing a story that was interesting enough to make into a film.From what I understand, "Observance" has done fairly well on the film festival circuit, so maybe I'm a Philistine. But I don't think so.I've lived long enough to see more than a few horror movies where I can recognize cheap and cheesy results because there simply wasn't enough money left in the budget to spend on the story.Remember when you were a kid and had something like mumps or chickenpox, something that gave you a very high fever sufficient to distort your perception? Your small-child experiences during the course of the fever were INNATELY horrifying because everything was nightmarishly distorted. As a kid, you had no understanding of what a fever was and what it could do to your perceptions. You didn't understand whether what you were seeing was real, a hallucination, basic reality distorted through a fever lens, and so on. You might not even have understood that there were even such things as hallucinations. As far as you could tell your whole world had gone crazy and terrifying, especially in the dark. I can remember some of the things I saw to this day and they still have the power to scare the snot out of me as an adult.Well, that's what the viewer gets with this movie. You can't tell if what you're seeing is real, hallucination, something supernatural, symptomology of a disease or some kind of poisoning, and so on. So, intrinsically, whatever you experience as a result of this devil's brew of cognitive pollutants being flung at you from the screen leads to a sense of queasy confusion. It is anything BUT good, scary storytelling.I also get the sense that there's an element of The Emperor's New Clothes going on here. What you experience with this (and similarly structured movies) is such a mishmash of incomprehensible goulash that you're worried that some sort of sophisticated symbolism or metaphorical abstraction is going on and that you, personally, just don't get it. So you pretend that you DO get it so you don't look stupid, cooing at its insight and sophistication, all the while having absolutely no idea what "it" is.You can achieve essentially the same effect much easier by just tying a victim to an office chair, covering their head with a bag, and then twirling them around until they get sick and throw up.I give the movie maker props for making a professional LOOKING movie so cheaply, but that's it. He's not a filmmaking impresario. He's more of a sneaky hack.

Observance starts out promising, making you think it's going to be some type of Rear Window, Body Double, Blow-Up or Blow Out type of suspense mystery. Instead, about halfway through, it turns into a confusing, "plotless" experiment in body horror and dream imagery. This is when the minutes start going by ever so slowly as, if you're like me, you start moaning and groaning, wishing something would happen already, wishing some plot would develop, wishing something would be explained or at least make a lick of sense. About two thirds through, if you're like me, you'll start looking at your watch wondering if you should even bother continuing; but you'll hang in there because the camera work is awfully nifty, the music is haunting, the lighting is creepy and there are a handful of jump scares after all. Then the credits will roll and, if you're like me, you'll shrug your shoulders and ask yourself, "What the heck was that?"