Like a lo-fi take on Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation, Joseph Sims-Dennett’s Observance puts the troubled Parker (Lindsay Farris, Primal) behind the telephoto lens of a camera perched in an abandoned apartment wallpapered in Asian newspapers. For reasons unknown even to him, he’s been hired to spy on Tenneal (Stephanie King, TV’s The Code), whose home sits opposite.
Grief-stricken and anxious for distraction, Parker can’t help but poke at the scab and wonder what’s up, and a peek into her past sends him — and the story — down uncharted territory. Clearly, what’s going on across the street is not as important as what’s going on inside his own head. Without revealing too much, Sims-Dennett (Bad Behaviour) starts channeling David Lynch, and Lynch begets another David, as in Cronenberg. You’ll never look at tar the same again.
Well-acted and shot with a handheld grip, the purposely vague Australian thriller can be as confounding as it is intriguing, to those unaccustomed to its paranoid bent. To want a little less Conservation and a little more action from Observance is missing the film’s point and denying oneself the rewarding pleasures of its slow burn. —Rod Lott