"The Outwaters" is effective as fuck
When reviewing any movie, note-taking has become a habit for the old sieve of my brain. When watching “The Outwaters,” the note-taking completely stopped halfway through, and no image is leaving the brain. A freaky, trippy descent into madness through the literal lens of the found-footage horror aesthetic, filmmaker Robbie Banfitch’s directorial debut comes closest anyone has to the sheer terror and au-naturel authenticity of Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s groundbreaker “The Blair Witch Project.” To watch “The Outwaters” is not to just experience it, but to survive it.
The film purports to be the found footage from 2017 memory cards by Los Angeles filmmaker Robbie Zagorac (played by the multihyphenate director, Robbie Banfitch). We first hear a 911 dispatcher picking up one of their calls, only to hear screaming, and that makes for an unnerving introduction. Back to the beginning: Robbie gives his older brother Scott (Scott Schamell) a backpacking trip for his birthday, but he’s also setting out to the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. Hippie singer Michelle (Michelle May) wants to pay tribute to her late mother with whom she shares an angelic voice. He also enlists help from his New Jersey friend Angela (Angela Basolis) to do hair and make-up. Once the foursome gets to the desert and sets up tents for the night, they wake up to wild animal noises and loud, not-quite-thunder booming at night. Is it supernatural, extraterrestrial, human, or something else? Whatever it is isn’t letting these four go home.
Serving as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and the main POV in front of the camera, Robbie Banfitch proves himself to be a resourceful filmmaker. For nearly the first hour, he lulls the viewer in, getting us to know enough about these characters through efficient storytelling and naturalistic performances. This first half does demand some patience, but the back half decidedly rewards that patience. In retrospect, one will be glad the film takes its time to just hang with this troupe, too, because the proceedings become legitimately terrifying and nutty. When the shit really hits the fan, Banfitch knows when to let the squishy sound design do the heavy lifting in the pitch-black darkness and when to actually show us the bloody (and visually ambitious) horror. Both approaches work. The harrowing intensity doesn’t stop even when the sun is still shining, and how Banfitch brings in Robbie's mother (Leslie Ann Banfitch) is affecting yet disturbing. One shot on a lake bed is like a nightmarish version of Terrence Malick's "The Tree of Life," and a single image of a silhouetted figure holding a hatchet in the twilight is forever hard to shake.
As Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard, and Michael Williams found out the hard way by making a documentary about a local legend in the Black Hills Forest, erase “making a music video in the desert” off your bucket list as well. Nightmares don’t often make sense, and “The Outwaters” follows that same logic as a nightmarishly elliptical mirage blended with an acid trip. Don’t try to make sense of it, just let your nerves be shredded and cut out of you. It’s a visceral, goosebump-inducing pulse test, and staggering as “how-did-they-do-that?” filmmaking. After so many found-footage horror movies that go through the eyes and out of the mind, “The Outwaters” unsettles and then lingers. It's effective as fuck.
Grade: B +
Cinedigm and Bloody Disgusting are releasing “The Outwaters” (100 min.) in select theaters on February 9, 2023, followed by a streaming release on SCREAMBOX on February 17, 2023.
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