OBSERVANCE
RATING: 3/5
(Unrated 18+) Selected cinemas (83 min)
A clever, low-budget exercise from the young Australian director Joseph Sims-Dennett, Observance is a hybrid of two familiar brands of psychological thriller. 
There's voyeurism, like Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. And there's claustrophobia, like Roman Polanski's The Tenant.
In this instance, the protagonist is voyeur and victim in one. Parker (Lindsay Farris) is a surveillance expert, hired to keep tabs on a blonde woman (Stephanie King) from an unfurnished flat on the other side of the street. It should be a simple assignment, but before long he's faced with a moral dilemma: if he suspects that his target is in danger, should he try to help her or just keep doing his job?
This is the kind of film where little happens but much portends, and where the narrative is hardly more than a pretext for the care put into cinematography, editing and sound design.
Sims-Dennett and his team build menace through fleeting images and electronically distorted voices, along with shallow-focus close-ups of mundane domestic details: coffee grounds in an empty cup, liquid swirling down a sink.
Everywhere we look, there are signs of something awry: the very walls of the apartment seem infected by a physical sickness that communicates itself to Parker's body, which breaks out in festering wounds. It's unclear how much of what we see and hear occurs in reality and how much only inside his head.
The setting is American, judging by the accents, but only nominally so; Farris modulates his uneasy reactions with skill, but never manages to turn Parker into an interesting character.
A bit more humour, and a stronger sense of a society surrounding the main characters, might have allowed Sims-Dennett to lure us further into his sinister imaginative world.