Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, after a year that has seen the cinema release of three terrific Australian feature films – The Daughter, Looking for Grace, and Sherpa – the bubble has well and truly burst, and after a splendid innings of a hat trick we are out for a duck.
Lacking a skerrick of imagination or coherence, OBSERVANCE is a mish- mash, miss matched psychological/supernatural surveillance film that strikes out on all three levels.
Minimalist to the point of meaningless with a niggard narrative that has scant regard for characterisation, propulsion or suspense, OBSERVANCE presents a broke and broken hearted private detective public defective hired to observe a female in her domicile. The lazy old male gaze scenario.
He sets up shop right across the road in a handily abandoned house, the walls of which are literally papered – probably pages of the script that were in need of useful recycling.
The bar for the surveillance film was raised to an almost insurmountable height by Francis Ford Coppola’s, The Conversation, but in the shadow of that Everest of a movie, OBSERVANCE doesn’t even get to base camp.
With the initiative of an echo, it’s a pity there had been strict observance to any semblance of dramatic build. Tedium reigns over tension, cataract pace clouds clarity, a slow burn sputters for the first half and extinguishes any anticipation of an explosion.
OBSERVANCE looks like its been made on VHS with performance pitched somewhere south of Days of Our Lives.
