The found-footage horror subgenre has always been a mixed bag, caught between playfully exploiting its pseudo-documentary techniques for jolty terror and floundering about trying to posit its mayhem as “real.”
The Outwaters doesn’t at first deviate greatly from the template set by its predecessors (in particular, The Blair Witch Project). Yet it turns out to be a cannier, and more effective, slice of shaky-cam insanity than most of its brethren, right down to a finale that’s akin to 2001: A Space Odyssey as processed through a meat grinder.
The Outwaters (in theaters Feb. 9) begins in familiar territory: the sound of a hysterical 911 call set to title cards and photographs of its four protagonists, as well as text that identifies this material as video recordings (taken from three camera memory cards) discovered by the Mohave County Police Department on Feb. 22, 2022.
Chronologically assembled, this footage is initially of a normal scene-setting variety, with Robbie Zagorac (Robbie Banfitch) filming his brother Scott (Scott Schamell) receiving a new backpack and writing journal for his birthday.
Conversational snippets about the present Scott got from his mom, as well as Robbie’s later phone calls and visit to his mother, suggest strains of familial estrangement, and as with his other subjects, writer/director Banfitch (in his feature debut) doesn’t fill in the blanks, allowing audiences to infer what isn’t overtly enunciated.
That lack of information may be frustrating, but it’s key to The Outwaters’ storytelling approach. Banfitch sells his film’s verité nature by eschewing anything resembling exposition, presenting scenes as believably fragmented glimpses into lives that are being largely lived off-screen.
Just as one wouldn’t narrate their home movies, so too do Banfitch’s characters refrain from dutifully explaining what they’re up to, instead mugging for the camera and joking around as twentysomethings might while having fun and embarking on a middle-of-nowhere mission with their friends. Consequently, details only emerge from brief remarks and asides—a narrative strategy that demands engagement with the action at hand and generates consistent curiosity about these protagonists.
From the bits and pieces dispensed by its maiden “card,” The Outwaters reveals itself to be a tale about Robbie’s attempts to shoot a music video for aspiring singer Michelle (Michelle May) in the Mojave Desert. For this mission, he’s brought along Scott as well as Ange (Angela Basolis), the latter of whom is handling makeup and clothing for this bare-bones amateur production.
They’re a friendly and cheerful foursome, as well as rather featureless, save for the impression that Scott is a bit reserved and stoic (he rarely speaks on-camera), Michelle is an artistic soul prone to breaking into song and twirling in circles, and Ange is jovial and game for an adventure, having never previously visited the desert. They’re recognizable types and, due to the fundamentally patchy and incomplete nature of these recordings, also somewhat spectral.
Patience is a necessity during The Outwaters’ early passages, as not much of note occurs, and what does take place is only tangentially—if intriguingly—related to what ensues. Earthquakes rattle Robbie’s apartment, and those unnerving reverberations are later echoed by the mysterious, rhythmic rumbling that crashes through the night once the quartet reaches its desolate destination and beds down in camping tents.
Rotating and flipped imagery of trees and water, meanwhile, are portentous hints about the topsy-turvy craziness to come, including via Robbie’s camera, which eventually captures an unforgettable upside-down sight of a harried figure fleeing him across the cracked landscape, the blue sky resembling a pool into which this person might at any moment plummet.
Water does factor into The Outwaters, as does lots and lots of blood, but identifying those elements is far easier than trying to make heads or tails of their purpose or meaning. Following a shoot marked by howling winds, an investigation into a rock outcropping with a hole that emits strange noises, nocturnal sonic booms accompanied by distant animal howling, and the discovery of an axe stuck in the Earth, Robbie spies a silhouetted man standing with said axe on a ridge.
The subsequent sound of racing footsteps and a smack imply an attack, at which point Banfitch’s film devolves into shattered chaos. Whether spied in Robbie’s tiny roving spotlight or seen in the blistering daylight, things go outright haywire, with the frame overrun by crimson-stained hands and feet, flickering overhead lights (often dancing about each other, or peering through veritable tears in the black sky) and shrieking skinless snakes (or are they something worse?).
In a manner that’s faintly reminiscent of Kyle Edward Ball’s recent Skinamarink, The Outwaters immerses itself (and viewers) in grainy, baffling visions that require intense scrutiny and nonetheless still stymie comprehension—even as it embraces gore with full-throated passion. Is this all due to extraterrestrial visitors? Forces bubbling beneath the arid ground’s surface? Or something even more alien and unfathomable? Banfitch doesn’t let on, and his film is all the better for it.
There’s something legitimately nightmarish about the way in which the director splinters his tale—and reality—into a million disjointed pieces, such that there’s no conclusive means of determining what’s beset Robbie, where his friends are, or why things have taken a gnarly turn. All that’s clear is that abduction, mutilation, transmutation and rebirth intertwine, twisting the world into some unnatural and brain-melting new form.
In The Outwaters’ prolonged final act, the best one can do is hang on for dear life and keep peering intensely into the darkness, hoping to spy or hear something elucidating. What one finds in that gloom are intimations of unholy intergalactic dimensions and gruesome realities that are even worse, and Banfitch manages the tricky feat of delivering the ghastly goods without providing a logical explanation for his carnage.
Ultimately embracing the irrational and impenetrable, the film becomes a mélange of grotesqueries and abstractions, equal parts stargate-sequence trippiness, subaquatic claustrophobia, and dismemberment-heavy grossness. You may not know what the hell has happened by the conclusion of The Outwaters, but it’ll be hard to forget the brutality Robbie and his mates endure, as well as inflict on each other—and themselves.
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