Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Sorry, this movie sucks

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

There is the skeleton of a story draped around the film, enough to make you think it might be going someplace or mean something, but it will all be abandoned, or ignored in favor of obtuse, confusing, unconnected occurrences strung together for no reason whatsoever. There are some good creepy moments, one particularly effective scare, and even reasonably strong performances, but basically it's a 20-minute student film made by a potentially talented filmmaker, whose sole dictate was to create a mysterious and creepy ambiance - stretched to 86 minutes without the least idea (or perhaps intention) of providing anything more. There is enough of a plot to leave you frustrated when it veers away into disjointed nonsense whose dots will never connect, padded out with a man hearing strange noises, the source of which doesn't matter and is never explained, or hearing strange voices on recordings which may or may not be ghostly voices, and photographing images that may or may not be some time-displacement issue, seeing a bottle filling up with inky liquid for no discernible reason and certainly not connecting to anything else in the film, or showing shots of blood drops run backwards. And then there are the extreme close-ups of rocks, and suddenly spitting out tar. You know, anything permissible under the rubric of "it's surreal", or "it's art" but far more likely "it's kinda like something David Lynch would do." Which might be justification for crafting a 20-minute student film, but not enough to try and pass it off as a feature film. I personally love complex films that make you work intellectually; but that's a far cry from incoherent, lazy film-making where nothing logically fits together however technically accomplished it might be in places. Considering its minuscule budget it is extremely well-done and uses its limitations wisely. Too bad there wasn't a thought-out screenplay that all of this could have been in service of.

I'll go ahead and say this was one of those horror films, like Alien, Absentia, AM 1200, Banshee Chapter, The Corridor, etc... that is very Lovecratian without overtly rehashing any of that author's stories.Also, a LOT of folks are not going to have the patience for this movie... it's slow... most of the plot is suggested rather than overtly displayed... there's no real gore or nudity (though one scene nearly made me puke)... and the end is open to interpretation. For the people, like me, who do get into stuff like this... subtle horror that will stay with me for days afterward... Observance is a damn fine little film. I wasn't aware of its tiny budget until after I'd watched it... and for me it didn't show. I think horror often works best on this intimate scale anyway.

PLEASE PLEASE do not watch this film. This is by far the worst film I have seen in my life and I've seen some bad ones. I Was waiting for something to happen the whole time the film was playing. But sadly nothing did happen. And everything that was going on in the film just made no sense to me what so ever. . Do yourself a favor and look for something else. Or u will waste over an hour of your life. Terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible terrible. Where these guys get the ideas and story lines from us actually beyond me. Plus the fact that these people are actually getting paid for doing this utter trash is crazy. I think even I could make up a story and film it and still do a better job that's been done on this movie. So all I need to find is someone gullible enough to pay me thousands of dollars for doing it. Sharknado is like a multi Oscar winning movie compared to this.

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.