[31 Days of Halloween 2016: OBSERVANCE is now available on home video and VOD.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
Australian
filmmaker Joseph Sims-Dennett's shocker evidently made some waves on the
festival circuit (or otherwise somehow finessed a lot of favorable quotes from
a lot of critics and bloggers you’ve never heard of).
I guess it’s a
could-have-been-worse experience; a hallucinatory suspense drama with
superficial resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola's THE CONVERSATION and some of
Roman Polanaski’s early work on insanity and obsession, and maybe a scintilla
of REAR WINDOW.
It’s got not so
much a storyline as a situation: In an unspecified city (which struck me as
Aussie locations dressed up to seem as American as possible) a young private
investigator (Lindsay Farris) is deep in debt and grief from the loss of his
young son. Stepping away from an imploding marriage (offscreen) he has taken a
big-money assignment secretly monitoring an attractive young woman on extended
leave from a biotech firm.
The unstable
protag occupies a deserted apartment building across from her window and is
distressed and powerless to see her seemingly at the mercy of an obsessed, possibly
violent suitor. But repeatedly, the (unseen) client tells him over the phone to just remain
and watch and not intervene. Or else.
