Rating: NR | Runtime: 110 minutes
Release Date: February 9th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Cinedigm Entertainment Group
Director(s): Robbie Banfitch
Writer(s): Robbie Banfitch

My head is raining.

The worst thing you can do with a found footage film is mistake the conceit for a first-person parallel. Yes, in some regards it is since everything comes from the perspective of the person holding the camera. But it’s more about what is seen and the premise that it all happened—you can’t capture the footage if it wasn’t there to be captured.

So, while I applaud Robbie Banfitch’s decision to blur that line and document a “nightmare,” it’s difficult to wrap your head around the logistics. The idea is that seeing impossible things should become scarier simply because their existence on these memory cards confirms they happened regardless of that plausibility. What occurs instead—at least to me—was that its impossibility destroyed the illusion and rendered the whole meaningless.

Many others disagree. Obviously. No horror film has been talked about more lately than maybe Skinamarink. But I didn’t love that one either. What I will say about The Outwaters, however, is that a lot of the imagery in the final hour does captivate.

At least that which we can make out since so much finds Robbie Zagorac (Banfitch) shaking the frame in extreme close-up (the most unbelievable aspect of the whole is that this character is thought of as a good enough filmmaker to shoot his friend’s music video when he can barely keep his brother in frame for a throwaway video to send their mother). The sound design is top notch and the surreal sense of losing time and space is exciting. And yet there’s nothing to grab onto beyond vibes.

I cared nothing for the characters. I knew nothing about them besides that Robbie lives in LA (earthquakes!) and goes nowhere without his camera; Scott (Scott Schamell) is too cool to visit Mom; Michelle (Michelle May) is a singer mourning her late mother; and Ange (Angela Basolis) is an old friend on the east coast coming to California for the first time.

They all head to the desert for the aforementioned music video shoot after almost forty minutes of forgettable minutiae courtesy of the opening intertitles explaining how the footage was “raw and unedited” (yay!). And, after a day of fun in the sun and a night of ominous noises, all hell breaks loose with the shadowy image of a figure upon the horizon holding an axe.

What follows from there is the reason we’re watching. Blood. Viscera. Intestine snakes. Doppelgangers. Sharp cuts to mysterious places. Flying? I like the fact that Banfitch calls back to the first two memory cards by mirroring events from happier times with a repeat drenched in red. And the sequence moving from tents to his mother’s house and back to the desert is truly unforgettable (by far the best ten or so minutes of the film).

But there’s zero substance. It’s an escalation in attempts to induce fear and discomfort that seems to go on endlessly (this should have been eighty-minutes tops) with flashes of brilliance being left to languish amidst the mundane and/or indecipherable. But I can’t begrudge anyone for getting on its wavelength. It’s definitely an experience. Just not one for me.

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Michelle May in THE OUTWATERS; courtesy of Cinedigm.