A review of The Outwaters
The trouble with the “character development” phases of horror films is that usually these people are repulsively uninteresting and we would not care about them enough to watch them if we didn’t have the assurance we’d soon get to see them maimed and killed in various creative ways. This phenomenon is very much in effect in The Outwaters, and the introductory phase, where the movie pretends to pretend that its characters’ unremarkable lives matter as something other than structure-filling fluff (there are reasons horror films are structured the way they are, introductory phases are necessary), goes on for a while. So these guys are heading to the desert to film stuff for a music video. The protagonist’s brother is estranged from his mom. To quote Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, “Who cares? Not me!” I’d like to see, I don’t know, a film composed of 1) the first hour of Sideways, completely unmodified, and 2) a second hour like the second half of The Outwaters, except with a real FX budget. That would be nice. It would be much truer to the way supernatural horror would intrude on real life if it actually existed—that is, in real life, you would think of the muggle world as a complete world, and you’d be wholly caught up in your own life’s mundane storylines until the horror from outside arrived. You wouldn’t be like the Outwaters characters, who are basically waiting around for something real—that is, horrifically supernatural—to happen to them.
But, man, The Outwaters is worth watching for its second half. There are serious stretches of actually existing Lovecraftianism here. This is the stuff that movies like The Endless are a fake version of. Yeah, I wish I’d been able to extract a comprehensible narrative of what was going on in the film’s physical world, and I wish I’d been able to literally see more, but at least they were genuinely trying to show real horror. You usually don’t get that. I found myself intermittently dreading what the screen might show me next, and I usually don’t get that. (By the way, if you’re looking for that sensation, watch Barbarian, which to a much greater degree unearths this lost art of horror filmmaking.) The frequent use of the “only a small circle of light illuminates an otherwise pitch-black field of view” trick was probably necessary given the clash between their budget and what they wanted to do. Someone had better give Robbie Banfitch, the director (and viewpoint character), some serious money for his second film. I hope he tosses more interesting characters into his next maelstrom, or dispenses with the “ordinary people” conceit and uses an in-universe “exploring the supernatural” frame.
I’ve decided not to directly say what happens in the interesting part of The Outwaters—it’s interesting enough that you should see it for yourself. I will say that the monster is nice, and that there are onscreen boobs (and a penis!) uncorrupted by modern Hollywood’s everyone-is-beautiful-no-one-is-horny patina. (Commentary on movies in general—it’s awful when you see this patina ooze from the screen during actual sex scenes. Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny, not even when they’re fucking. Horseshoe theory of onscreen sex—the twin nadirs are overacted porn and libidoless simulation.) I will also say that I’m imagining an extended universe encompassing The Outwaters, Resolution/The Endless, and Skinamarink (haven’t seen that last one, but I’ve read the TV Tropes page). Some dark god of the Californian outback presiding over a landscape riddled with time loops, and the war against him. An ascended Gray Boy, if you will. (It’s not a spoiler to say that Outwaters involves time loops. The entire second half of the film is in full Gainax mode.) Where’s the ratfic of this?