The Outwaters: Too Much Of A Good Thing

If there’s one thing I’ve never ever said about a found-footage film, it’s that it does too good of a job at what it’s trying to accomplish. There are definitely some good found-footage films out there, but there’s also a lot of hackneyed trash, so I’m just happy when one is actually good, never mind too good at what it’s trying to do. But as it turns out, that’s entirely possible. The Outwaters is a found-footage film that does a lot of things right, but in its pursuit of verisimilitude, it ends up being so realistic that it sacrifices pacing and a strong buildup toward its climax. There’s still a lot to recommend it, but it’s not exactly a slam-dunk.

The film opens tersely, with the audio from a 911 call playing over still images of four people. Something awful is happening in the background, screams and crying all garbled and distorted, snatches of speech coming through almost at random. The four people - Robbie Zagorac, his brother Scott, Michelle August, and Ange Bocuzzi, all went missing in August of 2013. There’s a click, and we’re presented with a title card introducing footage taken from three memory cards, presented in chronological order, discovered in 2017. That’s it, no overheated “this is the only record of the horrible events of that night” or shit like that. Minimal and dispassionate. What we’re going to see is an account of these four people who went missing. That’s it. So we’re off to a good start.

And the footage that opens up the first card is all very slice-of-life - Robbie giving Scott a backpack as a birthday gift and some of the sort of elliptical conversation people who actually know each other share. We can gather that their father is dead, Scott writes short stories, and that Scott has a strained relationship with their mother. There’s little rhyme or reason to it, it’s just snatches of the sort of stuff you record to capture important moments, but bit by bit a picture develops. Scott and Robbie are helping their friend Michelle make a music video. She’s a singer-songwriter in sort of a retro 70s Southern California mode (appropriate, since the three of them live in Los Angeles) and they’re going to go out into the Mojave Desert, camp overnight and shoot for a day or two. Scott and Robbie enlist Ange - I’m not clear if she’s their sister or just a childhood friend, but she flies out from the East Coast to help with hair and makeup and costuming. The trip out into the desert is uneventful, they get good footage, and then Robbie notices something odd - a strange charge in the air, like an oncoming storm. Then there are loud peals of thunder. At night, a strange light in the distance.

And then it all goes wrong.

In terms of what I look for in found-footage horror, this does a lot right - the dialogue and performances are naturalistic in their awkwardness and mundanity. It doesn’t feel contrived, it feels like the kind of stuff you’d find on some random person’s video camera, and it tells a story in the edges without being artificially expository about it. We get a sense of everyone’s relationship to each other without having it spelled out for us. The premise isn’t contrived either - they’re going out into the desert to shoot a music video, hence the camera and sound equipment. None of this “we’re making a documentary about this totally everyday thing for reasons” nonsense. Shots in the first couple of acts are often artful without feeling outside of the ability of a reasonably talented camera operator. My one gripe here would be that the music, although diegetic, often doesn’t seem to be sourced within the scene, but rather dropped into the audio mix in post-production, so it seems more like found-footage with a soundtrack at points than strictly recovered footage. But overall it feels convincing as recovered footage.

And this holds once they get out to the desert and - more importantly  once things start going wrong. Shots aren’t perfect, in fact, most of the second half of the movie consists of Robbie running around in the dark scared (or worse) out of his fucking mind and as a result, plenty of footage is of a camera being held at his side, pointing at nothing in particular or even shooting the landscape upside-down, which adds a nightmare vertiginousness to the proceedings. And the limited subjectivity pays off a lot - out imagination does a lot of the work here, aided by brief glimpses of awful, blood-smeared things in the darkness as everything, including a sense of time and space, starts to break down. Sound design makes good use of space, with far-off wails and immediate booms of thunder and strange cries and feedback. It’s as if we’re caught in a storm that tears reality away like flesh from a face, revealing the bloody nightmares underneath.

The problem, then, is twofold. First, the film’s a little too long at almost two hours. The first half of the film moves at a pretty languid pace, and though it’s less bothersome here, since it’s intended to establish these people, I did start to feel twinges of “get on with it” after a little bit. But it’s really in the second half where it really starts to show, as there’s really only so long you can sustain a constant barrage of (admittedly) horrifying imagery before it starts to become sort of numbing and lose its impact. It threatens to go from “get on with it” to “wrap it up.”

This isn’t helped by the second problem, which is a definite lack of structure. Again, this works perfectly well in the first half, but as it starts to set up the beginnings of the idea that something isn’t right, the second half suddenly slams into high gear out of nowhere and then doesn’t let off the gas until the end. Now from the perspective of verisimilitude this makes total sense -  you find yourself in a waking nightmare, nobody’s going to stop and explain it, shit’s going to get weirder and more horrifying regardless of your ability to comprehend it. But it really does come out of nowhere and goes on long enough that it starts to feel samey, just more horrible shit being stuffed into our eyeballs. In isolation it’s all very well-executed, but there’s so much of it without any sort of narrative arc or much opportunity for us to even infer things that it all starts to feel shapeless. There are some hints early on that something isn’t right, and they’re paid off well in the final act, but they don’t have the space they need to breathe among all the chaos.

I think if they’d spend more of the second half of the film slowly building up the feeling of wrongness and really turned it up for the final act, it would have worked a lot better. As it is, it doesn’t respect neatly packaged narrative and that’s as it should be for the kind of film it is, but it also ends up working against it. I think it goes to show, once again, just how much of a tricky balancing act found-footage films are. Most of the time, you get people who just can’t commit to shooting something that doesn’t look like a conventional film and so what’s supposed to be raw footage shot by amateurs just looks like something made by film students on the (very) cheap. Here, I think we’re sort of dealing with the other end of the continuum - it’s so committed to realism in all of its awkward, messy imperfection that the momentum we need gets sacrificed. But to the extent it works, it really, really works, enough that I’m willing to put up with it being a little too good at what it’s trying to do.

IMDB entry
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