You don’t need to see to be scared. Nor do you need to understand. ‘The Outwaters’ offers the rawest jolt of cosmic horror you can experience… Fear of the unknown. Madness. Monsters. The abyss… I keep seeing the criticism that you can’t make out much once the nightmare commences, but those people are missing the point – it’s not about what you can see; it’s about what you can hear. (Warning: spoilers follow…)
It’s about a group of travelers who are looking to make art in the vast expanse of the Mojave desert. But soon after their arrival, strange phenomena and unnatural sounds begin to torment them, and they are all suddenly thrust into a deranged, feverish nightmare mere humans simply cannot fathom… The narrative offers no answers as to what unfolds next, but it’s the type of film that doesn’t need coherence in order to work its way under your skin. Events are highly interpretative: whether it is because the protagonist has gone insane and is now experiencing his own personal hell repeat itself again and again; whether there’s something biblical at play; whether extraterrestrials are responsible for the cruelty inflicted; whether there’s government experimentation relating to science and the characters get unintentionally caught up in a rip in spacetime… the list is endless. But it’s the experience – the onslaught of blurred imagery and distorting sound effects – where the film succeeds.
The first “attack” sequence is filled with blood-curdling screams, crying, thuds of axe hitting flesh, choking on blood, death… you can’t see hardly a thing, but that’s precisely why that sequence is so terrifying. A single cone of light often forms your only view and it’s intentionally difficult to comprehend what is occurring. You strain to see even when a part of you wishes to see nothing at all. It’s a fairly effective piece of filmmaking. From then on it’s a mind-bending, malevolent headfuck that warps reality in chilling, gruesome ways until there’s nowhere left to look except directly up at the stars with your guts hanging out…
Unfortunately the film takes too long to get going, which is the main reason this doesn’t score higher. The first 40 minutes could probably be trimmed to next to nothing and the experience wouldn’t be weakened as a result. If there was some strong character work then you can forgive a lengthy set up, but there isn’t anything that emotionally connects to the protagonist’s hellish deathloop later. And since the rest of the cast are quickly dispatched offscreen, witnessing arbitrary scenes of friendship between them feels like wasted time. Several minutes is normal for horror films of this kind, but over half an hour is unnecessary and damaging to the film’s pace.
Overall, it might not always be easy to follow – and some harsher editing in the first half would have helped the film greatly – but I appreciated that sci-fi-tinged horror ‘The Outwaters’ tried something different and really took an ambitious lunge at depicting cosmic horror in a literal sense few others have attempted. The first half is very much standard found-footage formula, but the vicious shift at the midway point – which submerges us within a dark, experimental, blood-soaked nightmare – only gets more bizarre and disturbing the longer it goes on until finally there’s nothing but sun and gore flooding the frame.
Score – 7/10
The SS Criticism 