A film crew heads to the Mojave desert to shoot a music video, only to be
menaced by mysterious forces.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Robby Banfitch
Starring: Robby Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell, Michelle May, Leslie Ann Banfitch, Aro
Caitlin
Writer/director Robbie Banfitch's The Outwaters will
likely prove as divisive as the recent indie horror hit
Skinamarink. Like that movie it asks a lot of the viewer, requiring you to fill in
gaps with your imagination. Some will appreciate such an intellectual
exercise while others will argue that such an idea is the antithesis of
cinema. Why work in a visual medium if your storytelling requires the
audience to conjure up their own mental images?
The ensuing movie consists of footage from the three memory cards. The
first one mostly features random clips of the four friends meeting up,
visiting family, getting caught in earth tremors and just hanging out. It
lasts a patience testing 40 minutes and could have easily been condensed
down to 10 minutes. Things liven up on the second memory card, with the
group now in the desert. This is where it all begins to get weird. They're
woken up at night, Blair Witch style, by booming noises
whose origin they can't quite figure out. Is it thunder coming from the
sky, or is it emanating from beneath the earth?
Over the course of the following day there are more strange occurrences.
An axe is found embedded in a rock. That night, with the weird sounds
returning, a figure is glimpsed in the distance holding said implement.
Robbie approaches the stranger...and then things go full on batshit crazy.
The movie's final act is a descent into madness that features Lovecraftian
monsters, screaming snakes, self-mutilation and buckets of gore, with
Robbie and the others slipping and sliding in ocre when they're not
vomiting gallons of the red stuff. Of course, most of this is barely glimpsed as Robbie's camera pans across
the night time desert in headache inducing fashion. That's until the gory
climax, which plays out in blazing sunlight so we see exactly how consumed
by madness our protagonist has become.
Some have raved about The Outwaters, and not just the sort of gorehounds who are easily pleased by seeing
buckets of guts sploshed around. Like Skinamarink, it's been praised as an intellectual exercise, a thinking man's found
footage horror. I guess I'm just not a thinking man then, as I found it an
ordeal. To begin with, I simply didn't care about the characters because
despite spending so much time in their company we never really get to know
them. And then there's the limitations of the found footage format, which
is rarely accommodating of suspense because the audience only sees what
the camera wielding protagonist sees. Suspense is generated by giving the
audience information that's literally been suspended from the protagonist
- who's behind them, what's behind the door etc - but in most found
footage movies the protagonist and the audience have an equal amount of
information. This results in movies where we feel dragged along by the
narrative, rather than engaging with it. Paranormal Activity was revolutionary in devising a clever way of bucking this by
having its protagonists set up their camera while they slept, allowing the
viewer to see all the spooky goings on that they're oblivious to.
With its minimal crew and desert setting,
The Outwaters feels very much like a product of the
pandemic. I suspect dozens of similar horror movies were shot during the
lockdown, and the success of Skinamarink and
The Outwaters will likely see a few of them snapped up by
eager distributors. A new wave of lo-fi horror may be on the way. Whether
this is a positive or not remains to be seen, or perhaps barely
glimpsed.
The Outwaters is in UK cinemas
from April 7th.
