The Outwaters (2023)

Score: 4 / 5

2023 has thrown more than a few nasty curveballs my way, but I had no idea heading into this year that we'd be getting not one but two highly buzzed, experimental arthouse horror flicks in the first six months. Skinamarink came out of seemingly nowhere (no, I don't use TikTok, so I didn't know about it in advance), and The Outwaters did pretty much the same. Both are super low-budget, lo-fi horror experiences meant to destabilize more than terrify over their unbearably protracted runtimes. Like their clear inspiration, The Blair Witch Project, these films work hard to avoid any clear answers for what exactly is going on in terms of plot. The entire experiment, arguably, is to force viewers into a disturbed headspace and then require no small amount of interpretive input to complete their experience of the films. It's a dangerous gamble, one that inevitably polarizes audiences; I'd say if you love Blair Witch and enjoyed Skinamarink, The Outwaters should absolutely be your next movie night screening.

The film starts with a series of title cards and images identifying the four main characters, Robbie (also the writer, editor, and director), Michelle, Scott, and Ange, indicating that they have gone missing and that the following film was edited from their three memory cards found in the Mojave desert. Interestingly, the actors' names match their characters, which is perhaps a bit gimmicky now but does recall earlier pioneers in the found footage subgenre. Robbie, an aspiring LA filmmaker, takes his brother and their two friends to the desert to film a music video, and they do it while camping because that seems like a logical and glamorous thing to do. Sure, it's an obnoxious device, but thankfully the film leans less into their interpersonal drama than the beauty and intrigue of their setting. It doesn't take too long before weird things start to happen, from booming sounds and screaming animal noises to mysterious lights and camera batteries that won't deplete. When a shadowy figure approaches Robbie with an axe, though, the movie really takes off in a wholly different direction than I could have ever predicted.

The first half is something between Willow Creek and Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, at least visually, and it serves best to lull us into a false sense of what the movie is doing. Some will call it unnecessarily lengthy, but I found it quite beautiful, much like the unnerving silence and waiting in Skinamarink. The first half is also quite brightly lit, offering vistas of the desert like we usually don't see in horror films; the second half, however, is almost entirely in the dark, lit mostly only by a single small beam from a very shaky flashlight. If you're willing to go along with it -- and if you aren't prone to motion sickness -- it's a hell of a ride, especially when tentacles and worms and lights start appearing where they oughtn't.

Of course, we know they're all going to die (excuse me, "disappear") out in the desert, so the whole thing is set up in the classic sense that we're going to witness the unspeakable. It opens with a shocking 911 call that is mostly unearthly screams from a female caller and unidentifiable, disturbing sounds around her. And what we do witness truly is unnerving, though not necessarily in the psychological sense of most of these kinds of films. Banfitch wants this to be a somewhat immersive experience -- the sound editing and design is absolutely unbelievable and had me making all kinds of wild notes before I just gave up and let it wash over me -- and in some ways it is, specifically for his own character. But The Outwaters does one better than just immersion, and here is where we're going to step into spoiler territory.

Because, in the second half of this film, Banfitch leads us directly to Hell on a one-way ride. It's a fever dream concocted of a clear love-hate relationship with both found footage films and cosmic horror of the Lovecraft variety. We don't quite go insane along with Robbie, but witnessing his descent is one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen on film, to say nothing of the shockingly graphic gore this film splatters all over the damn place. Without (hopefully) giving too much away, or inserting my own interpretations, the film suggests some time travel or time loops, teleportation, alternate dimensions, possible astral projection, and no shortage of bloody, squirming, toothy monsters. Because it's all captured in the format of found footage, this marks possibly the first film about cosmic horror that suggests it's all literal; too often, cosmic horror can be discounted in a visual medium as an artist's flourish or even as a character's perception of the horror. Not so here, where we have to believe that all the batshit bonkers stuff going on is very real.

And while Banfitch stubbornly refuses to give us any easy answers, he does drop a couple major hints at the end (the gas mask and government sign of a restricted area) that suggest a certain "reason" for the events of the film. Even so, I'd be eager to see the film again to try and pick up any other clues sprinkled throughout, difficult as it may be due to the opaque nature of Banfitch's vision. What we're left with, ultimately, is an extraordinary experience of suffering under powers humans can neither fully appreciate nor comprehend, one that leeches out of the screen and into our eyes and minds. Having witnessed the carnage, we've had the veils lifted ever so slightly from our own eyes, insinuating horror for us that will long outlast the rolling credits.