Observance

Australian filmmaker Joseph Sims-Dennett's shocker bears a passing resemblance to Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, but put through a filter of hallucinatory horror that is closer in spirit to Roman Polanski's abnormal-psych thrillers. In an unspecified city, private investigator Parker (Lindsay Farris)—deep in debt and grieving over the loss of his young son—takes a big-money assignment monitoring a young woman who is on extended leave from a biotech firm. Parker occupies a deserted apartment building across from her window where he feels distressed and powerless to see her seemingly at the mercy of an obsessed suitor. Amidst clues and red herrings of powerful family conspiracies and past murder, the anti-hero's own obsessions begin to overwhelm him, with visions of death, mutilation, disease, and contamination. Many grotesque visuals are presented with gruesome effectiveness in what is still obviously a lower budget film, but in the end Observance is more baffling than coherent. Optional. (C. Cassady)