by Frank Calvillo
Synopsis
Parker is at the end of his rope since his son’s death. Unable to see his grief through, he’s watching his world fall apart around him. His marriage is crumbling and his debts are piling up. Soon, he’ll have to declare bankruptcy. Parker desperately needs help getting back on his feet, but when help arrives, it’s not what he might have expected. An anonymous employer offers Parker a contract — and a lot of money — to spy on the apartment of a young woman. The rules are simple but strict. Never the building which serves as his post. Contact no one. Ask no questions. Observe, that’s all. Lured by the promise of easy money, Parker jumps at the job. The first few days are uneventful, but as he watches the gorgeous blonde, his self-imposed isolation takes its toll. Paranoia creeps up on Parker as he finds strange objects in his lodgings. Horrible dreams haunt his nights and pursue him into daylight. It’s becoming clear that his mysterious client is hiding something, and finishing this job will finish Parker.
For a genre nut like me, Observance is the kind of of movie that wonderfully shows the sheer beauty of independent film. Its a simplistic looking movie that manages to genuinely deliver a multi-layered plot which draws on suspense, drama and horror. And it does it through a highly intriguing character piece, which manages to take things further than other titles of its kind.
In Observance, a private detective named Parker (Lindsay Farris) has been hired by an unknown client to spy on a beautiful woman named Tenneal (Stephanie King) and report back any and all activity. Holed up in a dingy loft across from Tenneal’s apartment, Parker’s every waking moment is spent trying to decipher what about Tenneal makes her worth spying on. As his investigation continues and his solitary existence intensifies, Parker begins to experience strange hallucinations and apparitions which are tied to the recent death of his young son.
There are a number of classic and “sub-classic” titles that almost instantly came to mind while watching Observance, such as Rear Window and 1408. I’m not in any way implying that Observance rips those films off, but rather it pulls the best elements from those titles in order to to tell its own very unique story.
The reason it also calls to mind various other genre films is because Observance is essentially two movies in one.
The first is the story of the case Parker has taken on and the beautiful woman who is his subject. There’s lots of mystery and piecing together with regards to Tenneal’s story and it’s great to be right there with Parker as character and audience unravel her past together. As Tenneal, King is great in a role which may seem no more than a function, but which actually contains an underbelly of complexity.
The second movie in Observance tells a story of loss and grief. Throughout his investigation, Parker continuously flashes back to sometimes disturbing images of his young son who died in an accident near the ocean. These images haunt Parker to no end and as a result, he has taken on a kind of life where he can shut himself off from a more conventional sort of existence in an effort to not have to face living in a world without his son.
As Parker continues on this path, he is driven to the kind of madness I love to watch in movies. Its the kind where the character in question is trying to fight against the madness until he realizes he’s always been a bit mad all along. Here, the combination of spying on a beautiful woman, his unknown client, and the unnerving living conditions he finds himself in, all begin to eat away at Parker’s psyche until he is unable to go back.
None of this could be sold, I might add, without Farris’ excellent work. Being the star of what is essentially a one-man show would throw off most actors who would sooner or later run out of material to pull from their acting bag of tricks. Farris however sidesteps that problem and successfully pulls off the highly challenging task of playing a man on the brink of insanity.
One of the things which struck me most about Observance was its methods of fright, which came at the most random of times. I’ve grown so tired of those cliched scares in movies which come from a faulty outlet shooting sparks or that glass bathroom cabinet that slides, making a screechy sound in the process. Observance offers genuine jumps courtesy of its supernatural elements and the terror and suspense work in great harmony throughout.
That’s not to say that Observance isn’t without its faults. A sequence where Parker breaks into Tenneal’s apartment is only sort of tense, yet does virtually nothing at all for the story, while the over the top finale proves just a bit too much.
In spite of this, Observance works so well within the various genres it pursues, that it should certainly become a cult classic in the future.
