The Outwaters is a slow burn found footage film about four friends (writer/director Robbie Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Michelle May, and Scott Schamell, using their own real first names) who go camping in the Mojave Desert to make a music video and encounter weird and terrifying things while filming it all. Starts slow; ends disturbingly.

In keeping with the found footage formula, following the Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity models, the first twenty minutes of The Outwaters are spent meeting the different characters and seeing them in their environments.  They all experience an earthquake that hits Los Angeles.  This part of the film feels like it could have been cut down.  We don’t learn enough about the characters to make the extended sequences worth it.  This is, however, part of the slow burn of this film. Banfitch’s camera focuses on small details – an insect on the tent roof, the candles on a birthday cake, a small animal skull they find, etc. – while we overhear information, or offers a lot of close closeups (we get it – Michelle May has nice glasses on).  The former is a favorite technique of Banfitch’s: we hear an entire conversation while the camera focuses on the moon over the horizon, we do not see a single speaker.  It is interesting the first few times, but it can grow tiresome.

Finally, forty minutes in, strange things begin to happen. Thunder rolls in the distance at night, but there are other, stranger noises. The friends are nervous, but in the stone-cold light of morning they can begin to shoot the music video and lots of other, irrelevant footage: shadows, a snake, the horizon, sand, etc. If one is patient and appreciates atmosphere sans plot of character, the film is quite effective.  Indeed, it can feel like a music video without music. The film continues to follow the Blair Witch model for the first half – disturbing days in the sunlight but the terror is experienced at night through the solitary light of a flashlight. Angela is seen covered in blood and screaming, something lurks in the scrub just out of sight, and every night the distant booming noises keep them up.

The camera work in the second half is perhaps more compelling. As Banfitch attempts to track down his friends who are running around covered in blood in the desert night, he undergoes a Lovecraftian version of the final hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but perhaps more disjointed and disturbing. If the first half of The Outwaters seemed formulaic, the second half seemed phantasmagoric and nightmarish, with things getting profoundly disturbing and haunting. You could not pay me to watch this film while under the influence of anything.

Lovecraft has come under fire for the racism that threads through his thought and fiction, but his influence on American horror is undeniable as the primary shaper and advocate of cosmic horror, a pessimistic, nihilistic approach to understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos.  The Outwaters is an example of low budget, found footage cosmic horror, with all the positive and negative qualities that those three things (low budget, found footage, and cosmic horror) entail.  It is compelling, disturbing, and not an easy watch, but rewards (or I guess punishes, depending on your point of view) the viewer who sticks with it all the way through.

7.5 out of 10