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Madison Neubauer falls asleep in one life and wakes up in another. Five years disappear while she is unconscious, and the town she returns to has quietly rebuilt itself around a church that did not exist when she went under. Robert Hollocks, who directed The Observance and co-wrote it with Amy Rhinehart Bailey, did not reach for a coma because it was convenient. He reached for it because it drops five years of change onto one person in a single morning.
“She’s out for five years and when she wakes up it’s like no time has passed to her,” Hollocks told me. “It’s like the next day.” That gap runs the whole film. It is also why The Observance works better as a study of manipulation than as a creature feature, because nothing supernatural is hunting Madison. People are.
The Cult Came First
Madison did not come first, and neither did the coma. “It was really the cult,” Hollocks said. “That was kind of the main reason for it.” The idea belonged to Bailey, who had spent years homeschooling in the South and, in his words, “met some very interesting people” along the way. She wanted to write about cults and how they manipulate people. Hollocks got a research hole he now describes with some affection. “I was up to my head in cults by the time we’d finished researching it.”
That research shows up first in an opening sequence that behaves like the last ten minutes of a different movie. A priest runs through the woods. Masked hunters close in. I told Hollocks it plays like a finale, and he did not argue. “It’s almost like the James Bond thing where you drop someone into the end of a previous story and you’re just totally captivated by it,” he said. “The idea for me was to introduce the hunters, the people in the jackal masks, and just set them up as a villain right from the very outset.” I want the prequel, and I said so. It turns out I am not alone, because Hollocks and Bailey have been developing a story along those lines built around Jonah and Athaliah, the cult’s architects. “They’re those kind of delicious bad guys that everybody loves to hate,” he said, describing a film about “how they came from fairly humble beginnings to kind of running this huge cult. That would be a cool story to tell one day.”
When Belief Becomes a Weapon
The line that stayed with me is “God is fear,” delivered during a monologue near the end. I asked whether that belongs to the character or to the film. Hollocks said both, then drew a distinction that matters. “It’s definitely his personal theology. That’s what he believes,” he said. “It’s not meant to be an anti-religious film.” The target is narrower and more useful than that. “It’s more about how religion can be misused and misinterpreted and twisted for individuals’ purposes.”
The film earns that distinction by refusing to make Jonah, played by Alec James, a con artist. Hollocks and his team debated it and landed somewhere harder. “I thought it’s much more interesting when you have someone running a cult who actually really believes what they’re saying,” he said, “much more frightening when they’re just completely convinced and convicted that their direction and what they’re doing is absolutely the right way.” He is right, and the reason is structural. You can out argue a fraud. You cannot out argue a man who thinks he is saving you, because every objection you raise becomes further proof that you need saving.
Building The Observance
The cult recruits like a business, which is the most unsettling material in the conversation. “They have a strategy of targeting people who are weak or going through some sort of emotional trauma,” Hollocks said, pointing to Gabriel Neubauer, Madison’s husband, as the clearest case. There is a property angle underneath the theology, and there is a chemical one on top of it. “Once they’ve come to the observance and they’ve drunk the wine and all the rest of it, then they become addicted to it.” When I asked him to confirm that nothing paranormal is happening, he did not hedge. “This is all just about manipulation and the psychology of manipulation.”
The physical film was built the same way, out of found things and careful planning. Shot around Augusta, Georgia, the production leaned on a community Hollocks describes as genuinely excited to have a crew around. The cabin is a real cabin. The church is a working wedding venue whose owners read the script, said yes anyway, and then turned up in the congregation scenes. He estimates roughly eighty percent of what you see was found and twenty percent was dressed. “I always believe that planning is everything,” he said, which is how the temple finale got shot in a single night, from around ten in the evening until three in the morning. Even the stylized slow motion machete throw near the end, the one that made me sit up because it borrows so openly from The Matrix, was a deliberate reference rather than an accident, executed with a fake blade and a friend who handled the composite.
⚠️ SPOILER WARNING
The next two sections discuss the fate of Ted Raimi’s character and the film’s ending.
Ted Raimi and the Safety of Familiar Faces
Ted Raimi plays Richard Abernathy, and his presence in an independent cult horror surprised me. The route was unglamorous. Hollocks had a contact who had worked with Raimi, reached out through his agent, and sent the script. Raimi read it, liked it, and shot his part in about three days. Hollocks talks warmly about how easy he was to have around, with no trailer demands and no distance from the crew.
Then he explains what the casting was actually for. “We sort of wanted to do that whole kind of Psycho thing where you bring in the main actor and then kill him off unexpectedly,” he said, flagging his own spoiler as he went. “He gets to play a good guy and he’s a great character, and it’s a shock when what happens to him happens.” It works because of exactly what I brought to the film as a viewer. I assumed Raimi would survive to the finale. He is Ted Raimi. The film uses four decades of goodwill as a trapdoor.
Horror Without a Happy Ending
Madison survives. Almost nothing else does. She gets her daughter out and loses the husband, the property, and any clean version of the life she went to sleep in. I asked whether a softer ending ever existed. “It didn’t feel right to just give her a completely happy ending,” Hollocks said. “It was one of those things where going through something like that would leave damage and scars.”
He was asked to reconsider. While shopping the film, he said, “a few of the people we talked to were like, could you have given it a happy ending.” His answer holds up. “Yeah, we could have, but I felt it would have been a cop-out for the story we were trying to tell.” Money would not have changed that either. Given another million dollars he would have bought a bigger death for Jonah, involving a stone structure over the water that the budget could not support, and little else. “I really enjoy working with lower budgets because it makes you more creative,” he said, and the tight, planned look of the film argues in his favor.
What he wants left behind is not a scare. “How easy it is to listen to the wrong person, to listen to lies, and for truth to be subverted and for faith to be subverted,” he said, before landing on the line the film keeps circling. “It’s like Madison’s line in the film is like, how did you fall for that? Everybody would think, I’d never fall for that. But people do every day.”
