meena_mahy SPOILER: so this Investigator was or is married and had a son. Seems to be turning his life around by engaging himself in his career. He gets an assignment by an agent to spy on the woman, he observes alot of fighting and misunderstandings between her and her fiancee.He is plagued by the symbolic death of his wife (marriage) and son. From the dreams he has, his son most probably died from a disease. His son doesn't seem uneasy with his father in the dreams and from his corpse-like image he doesn't have injuries depicting a murder.. There is a jar in his room full of black liquid and a small mini-statue beside it. At times the jar is opened and the little statue also goes missing at some point. The point is this man has memory issues.He does things and doesn't remember what he did. No one entered his apartment, he lives on self-hate and doesn't care about his body, hygiene and necessary daily things. He is a necrophiliac and this can be seen as he is aroused by the crime scene photos of a murder. There is an indication that he murdered his friend after he said a lousy comment about abortion of his wife's baby. He has a distorted mind plagued by death, even the simplest of things have significance to him or arouse deep twisted and sick up emotions in him.The murder of the woman is a great example of how mentally damaged he is. The way he murdered her was disgustingly obvious that it's not his first time.. although he does show some surprise in his reaction to what he had done. The guy who hired him is most probably the father of the woman's fiancee. This isn't facts but what I understood from the film..

Jason McKenzie 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.

S. Soma 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.

kosmasp Movies that are stake outs and that may feel weird to say the least, do have issues with character credibility at some point. And it's not different with this one, where you think, shouldn't our main character do something else instead? Shouldn't he see the signs and react to them rationally? But we wouldn't have a movie if he did. Also the actions are somewhat explained by his financial situation.So while you can argue these flaws and bumps in the story, you can also just a "enjoy" the suspense this builds up. And it has some very shocking moments indeed. It's a one location sort of deal, but it makes the most of it. And the suspense might be killing some people. And that's why I was surprised to see the lower rating here on IMDb. Didn't expect that to be truthful