Mark Reviews Movies: THE OUTWATERS

The Outwaters, Cinedigm

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 9, 2023

Writer/director/star Robbie Banfitch opens The Outwaters with the unsettling mixture of missing-persons reports, last-known photos, and an emergency phone call filled with terrified but somehow unnatural screaming. The movie immediately promises mystery and horror, and while it certainly delivers on that latter promise in the second act, the former one ultimately overtakes everything else, making the experience nearly inscrutable.

The setup is the stuff of so many found-footage horror movies. All of that introductory information lets us know that a quartet of people went missing in the Mojave Desert, a camera and some memory cards were discovered, and the local police department is using the footage contained on those cards as evidence in their ongoing investigation. The early material is a lot of hanging around, some implications about relationships, and establishing an excuse for this group to end up in that expanse of desert in the first place.

Brothers Robbie (Banfitch), who is mostly behind the camera, and Scott (Scott Schamell) live in an apartment together in Los Angeles, and their friend Michelle (Michelle May), a singer who's still grieving the death of her mother, wants them to help her shoot a music video. Accompanying the trio is the brothers' married sister Ange (Angela Basolis), who flies out from New Jersey to do the costumes and makeup for the project.

Mostly, though, the story is set in the desert, although that lengthy string of lackadaisical exposition, which includes a couple of earthquakes that might be important or might just be part of life in L.A., comes across more as delaying the inevitable than really developing characters or suspense. Once the group is out there, they start hearing strange explosions like thunder at night, record static-like noises coming out of the hills, and find a stray axe stuck in the ground.

Something is wrong here, obviously, and Banfitch is clever in the way he uses the minimal equipment of such an on-location shoot to investigate the strange occurrences. Of particular note is the implementation of a small flashlight with a narrow beam, which the characters use to scan the pitch-darkness of the terrain at night. It may or may not illuminate the source of those sounds—until, at the start of the movie's most harrowing sequence, it definitely shows why it sounds as if footsteps are approaching the tent on the night everything goes horrifically wrong.

What follows, then, is a truly unsettling scene, made up only of darkness, flashes of terrain, the sounds of running and distant screams, and wet thuds of implied violence. It doesn't last, unfortunately. The Outwaters tries to maintain this sense of dread, not by committing to the simplicity of this story and the technique of making it, but by inventing enigmatic elements, such as odd creatures and a timeline that starts circling back on itself, that confound more than they disturb.

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