OBSERVANCE

MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS, IT'S HARD TO TELL AS THERE'S NOTHING MUCH THERE TO SPOIL, TO BE HONEST WITH YOU

It's a common and familiar response to a rotten movie, to mutter the words "well, there's eighty-odd minutes of my life I'll never get back." This is certainly true, in the sense that the time spent was a poor trade for the artistry or entertainment received. How can one quantify an acceptable reward per hour or per minute, and how can one factor in the thrill of a potential discovery against the disappointment of an actual stinker? It's like the excitement of the lottery results against the wrong balls coming up yet again.

No-one's balls come up with Observance, an entirely unsatisfying zero of a film in which eighty-odd minutes aren't wasted, they're squandered and trashed in the least productive, rewarding or interesting manner, to the extent that sitting through it may well count as an act of self-harm. Shot on the extremely cheap in Sydney, possibly pretending to be somewhere in the USA but clearly not (and to me it looked like it was made in the UK, if only because one of the characters makes herself a mug of Yorkshire Tea), it nominally tells of a hard-up private detective hired to watch a woman in the flat across the road, take pictures and monitor her phone calls. Just keep watching, that's all he has to do for a ridiculously huge payoff. But is there something else going on? Is there someone else in his apartment? Is that a jar of blood on his bedroom shelf? What happened at the beach that he keeps having flashbacks to?

It's got a certain visual style to it, nicely capturing the dank aura of grimness of his flat (set against the clean, warm and comfortable home of his subject) but as any kind of a story or narrative worth following it's got absolutely nothing, with conventional thriller ideas (such as hints of a wider conspiracy with her employers) toyed with and abandoned. Some of it might be in his imagination, memory or nightmares, none of it's interesting beyond atmosphere. If I'd paid a rental fee for it I'd be emailing Amazon Prime furiously demanding my £3.99 back; as it is I want my eighty-six minutes and fourteen seconds back. John Jarratt out of Wolf Creek has a bit part.

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