Is the Found-Footage Horror 'The Outwaters' a Good and Proper Brain-Break?

I have only been in the desert once in my life, when I visited some of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre locations outside of Austin, Texas (yes it’s OK you can call me a nerd, I don’t mind), and that seemed like plenty to me. A snow-belt Northerner who hates heat and sunshine and also, you know, demands constant hydration, it’s very much not the place for me. So The Outwaters, the latest micro-budget horror flick to make some waves after Skinamarink and Terrifier 2 both took off unexpectedly earlier this year, is kind of pornography for me as far as the vilification of sandy wastelands is concerned. It triple-underlines my assumptions—The desert? What is it good for? Nuthin!

A found-footage flick that vibes hard on genre-daddy The Blair Witch Project (at least for its straightforward first half), The Outwaters tells the story of four friends—videographer Robbie (played by writer-director Robbie Banfitch), his brother Scott (Scott Schamell), and their friends Michelle (Michelle May) and Angela (Angela Basolis)—who venture into the Mojave desert to make themselves a little music video. Michelle is a singer and the song she’s recording is a tribute to her recently deceased mother, who sang the song to her as a lullaby; Angela is there to do makeup and outfit Michelle as “Hippie-Coachella”-esque as possible on their non-existent budget.

But before all of that the film begins with the recording of a frantic shriek-filled 9-1-1 call played over go-lucky photos of our foursome alongside their “last seen” dates, making it pretty clear right up front that even if you have no idea what movie you’ve sat down to watch the good vibes of an MDMA-laced Burning Man experience is not quite what’s in store here. Set up as the raw-footage taken off of recovered memory cards that will show us what happened on these friends’ fateful trip (see I said Blair Witch much), director Banfitch leans hard into an unfiltered and unhurried feel for the film’s first half, which is to say the movie might test your patience upfront. Especially if the sort of people who sing with feeling around campfires and dress in “Hippie Coachella” chic aren’t especially the kind of people you want to hang out with. Not unhurriedly, anyway.

Still, the four actors are all apparently friends in real life and it shows, in that they have an easy and unaffected chemistry with one another that papers over their lack of professional acting experience (at least until the movie begins asking more of them in the second half, but we’ll get to that). Banfitch has a good visual eye too, so there are some striking compositions as they head deeper into the middle of fucking nowhere desert hell—he gives you a good idea of the remoteness and especially the strangeness of this landscape; they could have taken a left turn at Albuquerque and stumbled onto Mars and I’d believe it.

Once they get situated, tents and oversized sunglasses alike, things start getting real real strange though. Like, proper strange. Recalling Peter Weir’s masterpiece Picnic at Hanging Rock (never ever a bad thing to recall!) a nearby hill of dirt seems to thrum with something like magnetism (Robbie’s microphones pick up odd noise, almost music, coming out of it). Every night there are the sounds of explosions echoing off the distant canyons—whether it’s a dry thunder or gunfire they can’t quite figure that out. But like the Blair Witch campers, it’s also here where a pounding sound outside of their tents begins to magnify the tensions among them. Robbie begins seeing strange lights in the sky, and clusters of frantic ants. A large axe appears embedded in the dirt. Michelle’s dreams become riddled with unhappy omens of her dead mother. Basically, we’ve got ourselves a hefty assemblage of “Get the fuck outta Dodge” totems that people in these movies never heed in sufficient time, and sure enough before you know it every unheeded body’s got some red on it.

What separates The Outwaters from the other movies of this sort is its structure, which gets split right down the middle (kind of like, spoiler alert, one of its own character’s skulls also seems to). What would usually make up the full second half of this kind of movie is here dispatched within a couple of chaotic minutes, leaving us a good hour or so (this movie runs just short of two hours) for something else altogether. Without venturing too far into spoilers I’ll just say this landscape morphs into something like a surreal playground of cosmic-ish horror, with time inverting upon itself and horrible hell-beasts slithering up out of the muck.

Or are they? It’s tempting, as the film plunges right off of sanity’s deep end, to chalk up what we’re seeing in this last hour to a good and proper brain-break—madness made flesh! But the narrative fact that all of what we’re seeing consists of video-recordings cuts that path off from us (unless Robbie bought some special newfangled kind of movie-camera that can capture hallucinations anyway). And so we’re forced, by the film’s found-footage format, to believe in all of the outrageous fantastical things that we’re being shown. And that for me unfortunately became something of a problem as the visuals get weirder, bigger, and strain more for artfulness.

It’s just that, as we’re supposed to be losing ourselves among the trippy visual and aural nightmare miasma of what’s happening—of reality sloughing off—I kept instead tripping up on all of its tangled logistics. “But Jason,” you will argue, “the anti-logic of unloosed psychopathy is the point! Just ride the wave, man. Dude look at all of those spilled-out intestines!” And there are truly horrific visions meted out in this extensive sequence—things I wouldn’t be unhappy to un-see, and things which will probably boggle your mind budget-wise. Whether or not the movie works on you as the horrible hallucination it intends to, you’ll surely be impressed by what Banfitch & Co wring out of their zero total dollars. I’m just left with a sinking feeling that The Outwaters doesn’t really add up to much in its end, save “Stay outta the damnable desert, ya dummies!” And hey, if that works good on it.