In short: The Outwaters (2022)

I’m back from that rather unpleasant viral intermezzo. Normal service resumes here.

A quartet of young people travel to the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Since the film starts with screams from a 911 call, and the footage we are about to see is marked for internal police review, we know the trip is not going to work out too well for anyone involved.

Writer/director/lead actor/cinematographer/editor and so on Robbie Banfitch’s POV horror piece is certainly not going to be for everyone. The film’s second half is in turns too abstract, too weird and too lacking in any clear explanation not to rub at least half of the film’s viewers the wrong way; if this gets to you, on the other hand, it’s going to get to you deeply.

To nobody’s surprise, I find myself belonging to that latter half of the movie’s potential audience, and was thusly completely riveted once the film left its solid indie-naturalistic scenes of character building and turned into a mixture of freak-out and experimental filmmaking with a bit of the old gross-out included for good measure. I believe The Outwaters’ mix of shaky cam, dark scenes lit by only a tiny camera light that helps to obfuscate, obscure and suggest things the film’s budget certainly couldn’t afford, and sudden bursts of bright desert sunlight is about as close as you can get to the old Weird Fiction dream of portraying something (or some things) incomprehensible to human senses. As such, and if you can cope with the overload of strange, organic, noises (Banfitch is his own sound designer, as well, and he’s pretty brilliant at it), shaking frames, blood and things man was clearly not meant to know, this turns into an incredible, nightmarish trip where bodies, time and space dissolve into something you can barely understand. To Banfitch’s particular honour, all of this feels strange and trippy in the best way, but it also seems absolutely controlled, suggesting a director who really knows what he wants to do, decides to go for it in his own peculiar way and absolutely realizes the kind of film he is aiming for.

Given how close to each other The Outwaters and Skinamarink (we could of course also add We’re All Going to the World’s Fair as a somewhat different sibling here as well), another very Weird horror film using techniques more often seen in experimental filmmaking and creating a truly uncanny mood, have come out, I am hoping for a bit of new trend in indie horror that uses the potential of atypical filmmaking techniques to create a mood of the weird, the horrifying and the inexplicably freakish. If not, we’ve already gotten a handful of fantastic movies out of the possible trend, which is all one can ask for, really.