[Film Review] The Outwaters (2022)

In February of 1959, the bodies of nine experienced Soviet hikers were found deep in the Ural Mountains in a disturbing state of disarray; stripped almost nude, tongues or eyes missing, chests and skulls caved in. Since then, theories have abounded; from alien interference to military experiments, from radiation sickness to aggravated mountain-dwelling cryptid. 

The Outwaters (2022) , the disturbing feature debut from Robbie Banfitch, with its Mojave setting of glaring sun and blood-stained sand is stylistically worlds apart from the — very real, very tragic — incident. Yet the found-footage nightmare conjures up the same feelings of cryptic terror and restless speculation that have made the Dyatlov Pass such an enduring and impenetrable mystery. The unknowable nature of the incident is enough to send you spiraling and The Outwaters delights in exploiting our urgent and human curiosity to understand, to make sense of what is happening and to confirm or deny any theories we may have.  

Spread over the course of three found memory cards, The Outwaters reveals the bloody and bizarre fate of Michelle August, Angela Bocuzzi and brothers Scott and Robbie Zagorac, four friends who ventured into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. What follows must surely be one of the most accurate representations of Hell ever put to screen, a grueling existential anxiety attack that plummets through the gaps in reality and drags you, screaming and helpless, along for the ride.

The first half of the film follows the dreamy last days of a group of friends intent on capturing the simple beauty of a girl under a sun-soaked sky. Surrounding the music video shoot, characters are built from the small and precious moments of everyday life: The clink of whisky glasses, the gentle tinkle of a lampshade, the glow of birthday candles, the warm embrace of a childhood home. It is these small, simple and safe moments that build the bones of the human experience, the frame from which we construct a life of love and laughter. The Outwaters takes those bones and shatters them, grinding them into a dust that will be lost to the wind and sands. Whatever is out there in the desert does not care about the home you’ve made within your memories. It will take your safe space and make it bleed.

While comfortable, there’s a nostalgic unease to the halcyon moments that indicate something is coming. Michelle’s quiet grief for her recently dead mother tinges the trip with melancholy, while tape glitches and sporadic LA earthquakes signal the upcoming shaking of the very foundations of our characters’ existence. While the first day in the desert is mostly uneventful, mysterious explosions in the desert distance reverberate in the gut and disorienting camera flips turn the world of The Outwaters on its head to signal the start of a downward spiral that it’s too late to turn back from. Fittingly, the dizzying descent into The Outwaters’ punishing second half starts with a question, poised to a shadow in the dark, to which an answer never comes. From here on out, up is down, in is out, and as the terror unfolds, more questions arise; What eldritch horror could drive a grown adult to cry out for their mother in the dark? To slough skin from bone? To blur the lines and bend the spaces of the very plane we exist on? Can you see that? Who am I?

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

But as pure existential chaos abounds in The Outwaters’ second half, no more answers will come. Through the pinhole lens of Robbie’s shaking flashlight, we see the characters we have spent a good amount of time so far learning to love, reduced to little more than screeching, blood-soaked animals. This leaves both them and the audience frantically scrambling to make sense of the tonal shift as we move towards ambiguity and unknowability in an inconclusive narrative that is wholly unsettling. 

Some frustrated reviews have berated the film’s lack of concrete answers, and anyone seeking a clear-cut resolution to The Outwaters’ desert nightmare will surely be disappointed. However, this is exactly why The Outwaters works so effectively as a modern masterpiece of cosmic horror, and why it doesn’t fall into the same traps as other pieces of Lovecraftian horror cinema such as Underwater or The Color Out of Space which try – and in this humble reviewer’s opinion, fail – to capture the abject fear of the unfathomable. What is unseen will always be more existentially terrifying than what is. The Outwaters perfectly captures the utter helplessness of humanity in the face of full-force cosmic assault, all the while remembering the golden rule of found-footage effectiveness: glimpse, don’t stare.

When all that is left of Robbie’s friends are small chunks of indiscernible flesh, he gently buries them under small altars of stone. It is these small, final acts of humanity which lend the film its most terrifying tone. Because while the onslaught of chaos, buckets of viscera and gnashing teeth in the dark are undoubtedly terrifying, where The Outwaters will stick with you most is in the soul, in the deepest and most primal recesses of your metaphysical consciousness. To lose your soul, spirit, your voice and eventually your body to the fury of something that humanity cannot control or resist triggers that most ancient of fears that all humans carry within and reminds us of the terrifying, inevitable truth of the film’s tagline; we all die in the dark.

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---