Robbie Banfitch’s “The Outwaters”

The Outwaters (2022)

Tedious horror with some nice Jodorowsky-style desert aesthetics is an incoherent, frightless b-movie in an arthouse skin

When a horror fails at suspense, it’s typically down to hurried pacing but here, we get over an hour of build up and yet I still felt no connection to the characters. I didn’t like them. I didn’t hate them. I had no interest in them at all and so when the horrors arrived, I was oddly disconnected. Furthermore, the film is meant to be found footage opening with a frantic call to emergency services before presenting the contents of three memory sticks. The problem is that it’s hard to buy into the idea that this is found footage and it becomes a distraction. Aside from being a crutch to perhaps explain a low budget, it doesn’t really add anything to the narrative.

At nearly two hours, it tells a pretty standard story. Two brothers go into the Mojave desert with two friends to film a music video but things take a dark turn… eventually. It’s at that point where the terror is meant to descend but without coherent build up, it plays more like cheap jump scares at best and nauseating visions bouncing in the dark by flashlight at worst. With only four characters, the expectation would be that there would be focus and weight on the their wellbeing, but no. The film at this point descends into chaotic camera work that’s hard to explain with the found footage scenario; why are they still filming? Where did they get such amazing batteries?

Visually, it has its moments but it’s also full of a lot of tired tropes too with even the upside down landscape coming into play. There’s also little gore until the final moments which raises the stakes at a point when it no longer matters and it’s so extreme, it’s almost laughable. And with that, there are the effects which are distractingly bad (think fishing line pulling stuff) for things that we didn’t really need to see.

Recent films like Skinamarink or Enys Men do better at building narrative, suspense and atmosphere. Other found footage films from Blair Witch and Rec to V/H/S and Host serve more frights. If the trailer caught your attention, I’d recommend going through Ti West’s back catalogue for a more accomplished horror experience.