OUTPOST (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Outpost, Gravitas Ventures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 18, 2023

It's difficult to imagine a less thoughtful and empathetic way to tell the underlying story of Outpost. One imagines writer/director Joe Lo Truglio, making his feature debut, has good intentions in mind with this tale about a woman who is traumatized by domestic abuse, but it's so increasingly misguided that the only worse possible approach, perhaps, would be if someone made a movie that intentionally tried to undermine, exploit, and belittle that kind of trauma. The best that can be said here is that Lo Truglio almost certainly ends up doing all of that by accident.

The evidence for the likely unintentional descent into such ill-advised territory is that the movie at least does sympathize with Kate (Beth Dover) for a while. She's introduced in the aftermath of a brutal attack by her now ex-boyfriend (played by Tim Neff). With her face bruised and cut, Kate attempts to return to life as normal, but she's in constant fear, because the ex could break the restraining order against him, and anxiety, imagining all of the faces at the restaurant she owns turning in unison to look at her in in some kind of judgment.

What Kate needs, she comes to believe, is some time away from her home, her work, and the city where she lives. With the help of her best friend Nickie (Ta'Rea Campbell), Kate finds volunteer work amidst the forests and mountains of Idaho, where the friend's estranged brother Earl (Ato Essandoh) is the chief national park ranger. Kate will spend three months, mostly alone and in complete isolation living in a fire lookout tower.

It's a very out-of-the-way location, a long hike past the dirt road and inside an elevated structure at the top of a tall hill. Her only orders are to keep a near-constant watch for signs of wildfires, to call back to base twice a day with her reports, and to only leave the tower in case of necessities, like using the cramped outhouse below or driving into town for food.

This is a fine and promising setup, with the on-location backdrop serving as a beautiful but hauntingly lonely place, filled with majestic sights and the reality of genuine or imagined threats lingering along the edge of Kate's mind. There are coyotes, leaving bloody carcasses behind, and lost hikers, making eerie statements about coming back to see Kate when they've finished with their trek, and the unfortunate problem that Kate can't quite seem to learn not to place things on the railing of the tower.

Beyond that, she keeps imagining her ex finding her or other men acting on violent impulses against her. The experience here is akin to a waking nightmare of terror triggered by signs or stray thoughts of any kind of threat, and while the idea surely is sound and based in some reality, Lo Truglio mainly uses it in the context of this story as a series of jump-scares and fake-outs, as Kate envisions a helpful store clerk grabbing her by the neck and her ex-boyfriend arriving at the tower to continue his abuse.

The major question here, as Kate starts to suspect her nearest neighbor Reggie (Dylan Baker) of a past crime and/or some ill intentions toward her and Earl of some conspiracy against her job, is what point Lo Truglio wants to make by showing Kate's life as this terrifying, horrific existence. The obvious answer, of course, is the simple and redundant one—that trauma can and often does overwhelm so much a person's life and way of thinking. It's not much an idea, and the filmmaker's reliance on scenes of juxtaposing the worst of Kate's imagination with the plain reality of things becomes repetitive, without adding anything new to the story or that broad depiction of trauma.

It is relatively harmless, though, especially compared to where this movie eventually takes the plot and the main character. With the help of a hiker named Bertha (Becky Ann Baker), Kate learns to fend for and defend herself, and because Lo Truglio has trained us to anticipate a separation of perception and reality, it's not difficult to figure out at least part of what's happening her before it's revealed.

Beyond the climax being a mess that seems to be edited around a planned twist that simply doesn't function, Outpost takes its view of the effects of trauma to such an extreme that it almost seems set on undoing even the minimal level of sympathizing the movie has attempted. Just as with the cheap scare tactics, the move toward giving us a murderous villain feels as if Lo Truglio is fulfilling a genre requirement. This villain, though, comes across as an insult on multiple, albeit likely unintentional, levels.

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