USA. 2022.
Crew
Director/Screenplay/Photography/Special Effects – Robbie Banfitch, Producers – Robbie Banfitch & Beau J. Genot. Production Company – Fathom Film Company.
Cast
Scott Schamell (Scott Zagroac), Michelle May (Michelle August), Robbie Banfitch (Robbie Zagorac), Angela Basolis (Angela Bocuzzi)
Plot
In 2017, a group of four trek out into the Mojave Desert and set up camp overnight in order to shoot a music video for up-and-coming singer Michelle August. That night, something terrifying happens.
The Outwaters was a directorial debut for US filmmaker Robbie Banfitch. About the only information about Baunfich online seems to be that he previously worked for the distributor After Dark Films and currently does for Greenpeace. Banfintch had previously made several short films and has other works in readiness as of this writing. The Outwaters gained reasonable word of mouth after its premiere at assorted film festivals.
On one level, The Outwaters could resemble a bunch of other Found Footage horror films – it follows the basic pattern of a good many works since The Blair Witch Project (1999) of a group of people trekking into the woods/wilderness and falling afoul of something that lurks there. Perhaps the nearest resemblance might be to Phoenix Forgotten (2017) with people lost in the desert and having been abducted possibly by UFOs, while the recent Horror in the High Desert (2021) touched on similar territory from more of a horror angle.
Unlike these others, The Outwaters is fragmentary to the point of frequently being what you could call ‘abstract horror.’ There is no clear idea of what it is that the group are facing in the desert – not unlike Blair Witch – with loud booms being heard, attacks by snakes and characters turning up bloodied. There is a lot of screaming – indeed, far more screaming than there ever is dialogue during the latter half – but we never see what is attacking people. This may even be – as the film seems to indicate at one point – one of the party having snapped or somehow been influenced.
Nothing is direct or clear. Even the dialogue in the film is almost all the sort of background chatter you usually get in a film – random monologues or people nattering about everyday things with very little of it being anything relevant to or progressing the plot.
Maybe the most apt comparison stylistically might be to Skinamarink (2022), a recent film that was all abstract horror – out of focus shots, indistinct sound and a lack of people at the centre of it – to quite eerie effect – or the British Enys Men (2022), another recent film of cryptic happenings set on an isolated island.
About two-thirds of The Outwaters is filmed at night where all that we see are handheld shots of characters’ feet, a distant corona of torchlight on the landscape or flickering glimpses of someone ahead. And the only dialogue during this time is screams and pleadings or else occasional prayers, along with amplified roars and what sound like animal noises on the soundtrack. There is not much else to the film.
Trailer here