Observance

I'll go ahead and say this was one of those horror films, like Alien, Absentia, AM 1200, Banshee Chapter, The Corridor, etc... that is very Lovecratian without overtly rehashing any of that author's stories.

Also, a LOT of folks are not going to have the patience for this movie... it's slow... most of the plot is suggested rather than overtly displayed... there's no real gore or nudity (though one scene nearly made me puke)... and the end is open to interpretation. For the people, like me, who do get into stuff like this... subtle horror that will stay with me for days afterward... Observance is a damn fine little film. I wasn't aware of its tiny budget until after I'd watched it... and for me it didn't show. I think horror often works best on this intimate scale anyway.

It feels like it wants to be a bit like "the ring" with fancy black and white flashbacks or flashes anyway .. a somewhat non linear storytelling and very little exposition.

There are efforts to make it "disturbing" .. that result only in mild confusion .. while the story itself remains unsatisfactory.

Acting is OK .. although not much seems to be asked of the actors ... brooding, indifferent and surprised are the emotions that are required.

While i did not hate the movie, i also did not like it. It was "mehh" .. solid enough not to be "bad" ... but unremarkable. The kind of movie that you look up on google during the runtime to re-check what the title was .. and a movie that you forget entierly 10 minutes after having watched it.

3/10.

It's not boring because the plot is interesting, but the grade is low due to poor realization. From the beginning we are not nicely introduced to the plot and the story, as well as the characters, are not elaborate enough. At the end of the film, I expected at least some explanation, but nothing. The same mystery remained as at the beginning because I didn't understand anything.

Most of the movies runtime is spent by observing....duuuh. However not the entertaining kind but rather the really boring one. Our protagonist is observing a young woman in a building across the street as he witnesses bizarre sightings that slowly seem to threaten him more and more.

"Slowly" is the right word because this movie was really slow paced and there's not much happening for most of the time. The only interesting scenes are dreams or visions by our protagonist and there are a few suspenseful scenes involving the woman in the building across the street. However most of its runtime is pretty boring and not worth watching. [3,8/10]

Filmed on the director's credit card over an 11 day period during the hottest heatwave on record in Sydney Australia, Observance is certainly a film that defies its beginnings and conception to showcase an impressively dread laden tale that displays a palpable sense of terror of malevolence from the first frame through to its last confronting and shocking finale.

Director Joseph Sims-Dennett crafts his second feature length film in a manner that is not dissimilar to films such as Rear Window (the spying and voyeurism), Ti West's The House of the Devil (pacing and incoming sense of evil) and even Ben Wheatley's Kill List (in the way it culminates into an uncompromising crescendo) and despite being largely confined to a rundown apartment building for a majority of its runtime, Observance never lets its tight confines strangle its atmospheric nature and intriguing plot that covers loss, mental health and a seriously bad fever.

On face value Sims-Dennett and co-writer Josh Zammit's story may seem slight, grieving man accepts job that involves watching pretty women for a mysterious client, but like a large portion of other successful psychological and slow burning horrors, Observance draws the audience in only to confront them with some terrifying scenarios that are delivered in low key ways to make them that much more effective.

The major drawback of Sims-Dennett's fine work however is the fact he hides the films heritage as an Australian film by having his cast led by the committed Lindsay Farris as tortured soul Parker speak in American accents, which so often is the case when local films try for this, distracts from some of the films tense moments, never more so highlighted by local industry vet and Mick Taylor himself John Jarrett's brief cameo around the midpoint of the film. It would've been great to see Sims-Dennett embrace the films origins (even at the cost of appealing to overseas audiences) but it still doesn't deter from the fact this is one of the most impressive low budget Australian offerings of the decade.

Observance acts as a finely tuned calling card for Sims-Dennett who could quickly become one of Australia's newest directing white knights and there's little doubt that Hollywood will come calling to a filmmaker that has both the determination and skill to pull off tricky subject matters and while Observance may waver slightly in certain elements and executions, its often downright masterful in the way it delivers its chills and Horror aficionados alongside Australian cinema fans would do well to seek it out.

3 ½ ominous jars out of 5