The Outwaters (2022, Robbie Banfitch) (Patreon)

44/100

Don't know whether folks are taking sides w/r/t 2022's twin assaults of aggressively abstract, quasi-avant-garde horror, but if so I'm decidedly #TeamSkinamarink. And not just because The Outwaters squanders its first 52 minutes—nearly half the goddamn film!—on a "casual" found-footage setup/prelude so tediously banal, featuring such nondescript characters, that The Blair Witch Project's pre-woods stuff looks like a James Bond cold open by comparison. Didn't turn it off at my standard W/O point solely because someone had briefly made it a poll request, before learning that I planned to take a look regardless, and the thought of potentially having to sit through all of that soporific camaraderie and earnest musical rehearsal (they're heading to the desert for a video shoot) again* was more than I could bear. One could argue, I suppose, that we're being lulled into a false sense of security that makes what follows all the more startling, but it seems clear to me that Banfitch, who also plays what becomes the central role, aimed for lightly engaging (à la, say, The Myth of the American Sleepover) and just fell ruinously short (à la every shitty commercial pushing "young and carefree" that you've ever seen). Wish I could say that the destination is worth the journey, but while Banfitch's commitment to visual obscurity and narrative inscrutability merits respect, his primary method—illuminating elements of a blood-slicked face, body or object with a small flashlight beam—can't sustain a full hour of unexplained, inexplicable mayhem. (Few will appreciate the reference, simply because few have seen the referent, but a lot of The Outwaters' second half amounts to "What if a torture porn movie were shot like Il buco?") And I think it was a grievous miscalculation to immediately turn the nightmare into a one-insane-man show, leaving us with solo stumbling and gibbering for the duration. Efforts to push the envelope are always welcome, though, and for those hardy souls who can survive this one's seemingly endless nothing-to-see-here-wink-wink appetizer of pure ennui, there is, to be sure, an experience not soon forgotten lying in wait.  

* I don't just pick up where I left off in those instances, both because seeing ⅔ of a film months or even years after the first third seems unfair and because I don't like the idea of logging on 23 Nov a movie that I started watching on 11 Apr. So I always start over from the beginning.