What if Cloverfield, but weirder?
That seems to be the thinking behind The Outwaters, director Robbie Banfitch’s found footage cosmic horror about a quartet of twentysomething hipsters who take off into the desert to film a music video, and end up the victims of unseen, reality-warping forces.
Banfitch’s approach to tension is definitely taken from The Blair Witch Project, as videographer Robbie heads out into a scenic nowhere with his brother (Schamell), their musician friend (Basolis), and an old buddy (May). There’s a lot of driving and chatting and discussions about parents that don’t add up to much, and then it’s everyone for themselves as logic breaks down and The Outwaters becomes an intense and enigmatic experimental collage.
The real credit goes to the sound design team of the ubiquitous Banfitch, Pete Barry, Melody Elwell Romancito, and Matt Shivers, who more than make up for Banfitch’s next-gen shaky-cam cinematography and his patience-testing approach to editing. The closing 40 minutes are a chaotic sprint across the desert in blackness, with erratic pockets of light catching glimpses of something in the murk – an effect that occasionally feels like watching the film through a hosepipe. It both borrows from and reacts against the final act of Bobcat Goldthwait’s found footage experiment, 2014’s Willow Creek. After a similarly protracted buildup, Goldthwait builds tensions by sealing his protagonists in a tent with only a torch for company – an elaboration on Blair Witch‘s famous lit-from-below confessional. The Outwaters just becomes a lot of stumbling around until the scene finds an artfully/accidentally composed shot, as off-putting as Nikolas List’s blunder in the dark, Tombville (an obscure but intriguing footnote in the history of found footage). Yet with that sound design the experience becomes richer, more disturbing, even less moored in reality.
The Outwaters stumbles because it fails to clear the second hurdle of any found footage movie: not simply answering why would the camera stay on (that’s the easy part), but why would anyone edit what’s been recovered in this way? The intrusion of non-diegetic music, those artful shots, somehow undermine its impact. It becomes a mood more than a narrative – not as if that hurt the equally obtuse Skinamarink.
Yet maybe that enigmatic nature is what sends the The Outwaters rippling. H.P. Lovecraft recognized that such horrors must be beyond human comprehension, and for their leap into a mysterious cosmos, Something in the Dirt, Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead explored that ambiguity through unreliable narrators. Banfitch embraces the confusion and creates something experiential.
This article appears in February 10 • 2023.
