I had no idea what to expect from this. It was Genuinely creepy which was a good start.It had some unexplained character past, which usually gives you the inclining of a well rounded, satisfying plot.Unexplained happenings, research into other character's suspicious past.Then - Bang! it ends, nothing explained in, not even the smallest detail.Bang, it ends and you're just wildly guessing.It's like they forgot to dot the i's and cross the t's and at the end just went "meh, that'll do."Could have been great, could have been fantastic. Was nothing.

Another Australian movie flop, worse of all they did terrible USA accents. On what planet did they think this was good. Only redeeming feature was Stephanie King. All over the place, yes he lost the plot but the whole plot was all over the place, everyone seemed nuts. It was so bad I am just typing 10 lines to warning anyone thinking of watching this. I advise don't, there is plenty of good Australian movies out there, I like Australian movies, when they try to stay Australian and not go with very stupid scripts. No real story about the main characters wife, not enough story about his son, how did he die, or did I just fall asleep in that part. No spoilers and there is nothing to spoil. Only thing about this movie is it's advice to see a doctor when you get a cut or burn etc, as it may go septic.

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.

"When I first saw this film", said the London Film Festival luminary who introduced it, "I was haunted by it for weeks". I can't say I had the same reaction: I was mildly annoyed for a few minutes, perhaps.The plot is actually pretty decent: Parker, a surveillance operative, is hired to spy on a young woman. He moves into a dilapidated building opposite her flat, from where he takes pictures and listens in on her telephone conversations. But strange things are happening in his building: the shower water suddenly runs scalding hot, blocked-up windows mysteriously unblock, and there's a jar full of an ever-increasing amount of black liquid in the corner. All this - plus strange visions of his deceased young son - seems to be having an effect on Parker's health...But the film has the feel of a student project that somehow metamorphosed into a full-length production. It's very arty-farty - the washed-out shots of isolated clifftops had me expecting to see Death with a chess board at any moment. No effort is made to explain many happenings - such as the bear's head, or the faceless woman, or that jar of black liquid - giving the impression the producers thought they'd be really cool things to put on screen but couldn't be bothered to work out why they should be there. And that's before we consider the mistakes: the energetic sex scene where Parker is obviously still wearing his underpants, and the woman supposedly just stepped out of a shower who is, in fact, bone dry. But in the scenes where Parker is roaming around his claustrophobic house, the film-makers have unquestionably successfully created a dark and threatening atmosphere, and some the close-up camera-work of, for example, carpet threads or drops of blood is pretty good.In the lead role, Lindsay Farris is a near-constant presence on screen; as such it's fortunate that he's easy on the eye, nicely filling his white T-shirt and black jeans. But there are too many shots of him leaping backwards in surprise, and his American accent wavers all over several States (and becomes Irish at one point). In fact, although the cast is largely Australian - and this is an Australian film - they all use American accents - an emerging trend in Australian cinema? (see also 'Infini').I like to end reviews on a good note, so here's one: when Parker awakens from a nightmare, does he do the usual thing of sitting bolt upright in bed, panting heavily? No he does not! His eyes snap open in surprise, but he stays laying down. A definite plus point in the film's favour - some film clichés really should be laid to rest.