The Outwaters (2022, dir. Robbie Banfitch) - review by Rookie-Critic
There is a quiet uprising in experimental horror happening. We got a glimpse of it in January with Skinamarink, and we're seeing it now with The Outwaters, a new found footage horror from Robbie Banfitch, who makes his feature film debut with this. It has me very excited, and I am very open and welcoming of what is hopefully a new trend, the genre needs the injection of big risks and massive creativity from fresh minds. Skinamarink took a next-to-nothing budget, a fairly modest story, and an incredibly minimalist approach to its shooting style and turned it into an incredibly unsettling, deeply engaging and creepy horror film. It works because, despite its sparse engagement with the setting and dialogue, it does engage with its characters, and makes the absolute most of every frame. It keeps you guessing, keeps you listening, keeps you engaged, and most importantly, keeps its story coherent enough for you to get by. The Outwaters, unfortunately, takes a very similar minimalist approach to its shooting style, a very similar approach with the low engagement of setting and dialogue, but fails to keep itself coherent or engaging.
The setup is decent enough, we get a sense of who our central four protagonists are, and as the movie inches closer to its hard left into the pit of terror that makes up the film's second half, things begin to get steadily creepier and more unnerving with each passing shot. It's a great setup, and even when the rug gets pulled out from under the audience, and we are basically ejected out of this slow burn we thought we were in directly into a blood-soaked nightmare of desert darkness and seemingly supernatural, almost Lovecraftian "descent into madness" type stuff, I was still on board. Full on sitting forward, hands on the top of the seat in front of me, wide-eyed bought in. I was wildly wondering where it could go from here, and applauding the film's massive tone shift as well as its truly unique take on found footage camerawork. After the big change, the protagonist, Robbie, starts to film the events happening to him almost as someone who has forgotten their camera is even running. He's not interested in documentation, he's interested in getting the hell out of the desert, and that's such a brilliant way to play it. However, as far as that wild pondering about where it was going, the answer was it doesn't really go anywhere from there. The darkness becomes less terrifying and more frustrating, the scenes that take place during the daytime provide little support, and are really a series of vignettes as opposed to a coherent through line; they all work decently fine as their own segments or shorts, but don't really connect in any real, narrative sense. It almost becomes more of a mood piece, which is fine in a sense, but it overstays its welcome, and the little tidbits of history we were given on our ensemble don't add up to enough to make any of the abstract pieces in the second half of the film hold ground.
I could name a dozen little things that kind of irked me in the film as well: it's presented as "raw footage" found in the desert years after these people went missing, but then there are nondiegetic music cues and sound effects added into the film. There is something towards the end of the film that insinuates something about the nature of their situation that, to me, makes no sense with the things that our camera is able to see, because ultimately we're not seeing the film through Robbie's actual eyes, we're seeing this through what we're told is raw camera footage, and I just couldn't make some things make sense. There's this big question of whether or not our characters are alone out there, and I think arguments could be made for either choice, but really the film isn't super interested in its potential fifth cast member too much, outside of making a couple of scenes a little creepier. There's more, but I'm already verging on spoiler territory. I wanted this to be better than it was, it has a lot of potential and I think it takes a lot of big swings at changing the perception of how found footage has to be presented, and I applaud it for all of that, I don't want to take any of that away from Banfitch. I just don't think his narrative or the overall feel of his film ended up connecting with me in any real way, and that's a shame.
THE OUTWATERS (2022) 12 reviews of found-footage horror movie - with new trailer
THE OUTWATERS (2022) 12 reviews of found-footage horror movie – with new trailer
‘We all die in the dark’
The Outwaters is a 2022 American found-footage horror film about four travellers who encounter menacing phenomena in the Mojave Desert.
Written, produced, photographed, directed, edited by and starring Robbie Banfitch.
The Fathom Films production also stars Angela Basolis, Scott Schamell, Leslie Ann Banfitch and Melissa Andrea.
Release:
In the USA, Cinedigm will release…
