Cosmic horror is a tricky sub-genre to capture on film. The unspeakable ancient entities, the immensity of the space void, the visions too indescribable for human minds to comprehend… how do you make a movie about such… well, unspeakable horrors? Perhaps if H.P. Lovecraft were alive today and was an accomplished filmmaker, who knows?
Which brings us to this found footage horror The Outwaters (USA, 2022, 100 min.), the latest attempt to capture the slippery tentacles of the genre in images. The film stars Robbie Banfitch (who also directs, writes and edits) as Robbie (all the characters have the same name as their performers), a filmmaker who agrees to shoot his friend’s (Michelle May) music video in the Mojave Desert. They are accompanied by Robbie’s brother (Scott Schamell) and their make-up artist friend (Angela Basolis), and for a brief period, everything goes smoothly. But it’s not long before the group’s trip goes up in smoke, and the quartet disappears without a trace. Beginning with a desperate audio of an emergency phone call, the film tells its story in three acts, where each section is taken from three memory cards that the group left behind.
If you’ve ever watched a found footage movie in your life, you’re probably wondering what’s on that last memory card, and I confess that The Outwaters left me seriously tempted to put the movie on fast forward and find out what happened, long before the third act arrived. Banfitch makes a noble effort to offer a bit of character development before the unimaginable nightmare begins, but there’s little humor, fear or drama in these early scenes, and the premise of a filmmaker and his friends planning a clip in the middle of the desert is, between you and me, about as exciting as taking a urine test.
But after testing the viewer’s patience in the first half of the movie, the final third of The Outwaters takes us from zero to 300km/h in a matter of seconds. You could say that the troupe of friends accidentally set up camp on a fault in the desert that leads straight to hell, and the rest of the movie follows the last survivor, Robbie, trapped in an endless spiral of madness and mutilation. Believe me, there’s everything: slithering tentacles, pools of vomit and blood, a ripped-off penis, and crazed entities that scream more than the devil. And the whole time I was thinking, “I wish I could see more of all this!” After all, faced with the challenges of capturing indescribable cosmic forces on film under the obvious budgetary constraints of the movie, Banfitch opts to shoot the entire long sequence almost exclusively in first person, illuminating everything with just a small flashlight. For those with little patience for found footage’s propensity to fill the screen with generous amounts of screaming and a constantly unstable camera, watching The Outwaters will be a torment.
Although much of The Outwaters is boring and confusing, there is something else you need to know. While watching the last thirty minutes of the movie, I found myself several times curled up on the sofa with my hands to my face in a state of anxiety and anticipation. The little first-person flashlight never fails to be an annoying distraction from the found footage, and I could rarely tell what the hell was going on during all the nonsense, but watching a movie throw so much gruesome stuff in your face over a long period of time proved to be an electrifying experience, one that rewards the most patient horror fans in its final moments. I’ve never seen a movie start from a bloody body writhing in the desert using an extended sequence that literally transports the movie to the cosmos. Finally, The Outwaters pulls the viewer out of the madness of that endless night and brings them back to the relative calm of midday in the Mojave Desert, at which point I was presented with one of the most chilling and ingenious shots I’ve had the good fortune to see in recent times. The scene is still in my head.
I have no doubt that The Outwaters will be divisive among horror fans when it reaches a wider audience. The way I see it, it’s just as easy for me to imagine a sensible person hating this movie, just as I can easily imagine someone buzzing with excitement because they’ve been given that rare gift of the genre: something you simply haven’t seen before. With The Outwaters, Robbie Banfitch invites us to stop worrying about what lurks in the dark corners and turn our attention to the stars. With a certain apprehension.
