The Outwaters (2022)

For reasons that now elude me, The Outwaters has been on my “must see” list for several years.

Now thanks to Shudder I’ve seen it and that’s two hours of my life where I could have been doing something much better.

Four twentysomethings go into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video in an out-of-the-way place, and instead get tangled up in some very weird and horrific, indescribable, cosmic horror shit. The film we're watching is then presented as recovered footage entered into evidence for a police report on the four missing persons.

I cannot tell a lie: The Outwaters is the epitome of everything I hate about "found footage" films.

On one hand, this aspect has a very solid air of authenticity to it, but that means: migraine city.

Written and directed by the film's main protagonist Robbie Banfitch, this is "found footage" at its most irritating.

For the better part of 110 minutes, we are “treated” to too much camera shake, too many “in your face” close-ups, muffled dialogue and blurred and out-of-focus visuals.

It’s really difficult to follow along or get a handle on any of our protagonists. There’s no one to empathise with or even care about.

This is certainly no Blair Witch or As Above, So Below, where effort was made to present faux footage in a cinematic manner. Even the divisive Skinamarink makes more sense.

The extended 20-minute set-up is really hard going, and a waste of film, as the narrative only starts to struggle into being once the characters get to the desert and hints of the peculiarities-to-come start to manifest. 

The film definitely feels like it's going to pick up once the quartet are in desert and getting spooked by strange subterranean explosions and the mandatory paranormal light shows, but too much is buried under a surfeit of found footage tropes. 

An hour into the viewer's ordeal, the really weird shit seems to kick off, but it's the middle of the night, and it’s impossible to get even a vague idea of what’s going on as all we see are random flashes of light accompanied by hysterical screaming.

Banfinch strives way too hard to find verisimilitude in the footage but instead simply looses his audience quiet rapidly in a mess of blood and strange sounds, screaming red reptiles, all mixed in with some time loop shenanigans, and some kind of demon.

There's even a half-baked attempt to suggest the characters had stumbled into some top secret government experimental zone (à la Stranger Things), but that's just another piece of mud slung at the wall to see what sticks. That and the self-inflicted penile amputation that's way funnier than I think it was supposed to be.

This is the sort of movie that a certain breed of film student will spend ages trying to analyse and dissect, coming up with their own elaborate theorems of what it all means. But, seriously, you could watch a black screen with someone screaming in your face for an hour and come to the same conclusions. 

To be fair, I think I actually get what Banfinch was trying to do by bombarding us with a constant, supercharged sense of extreme disorientation, but he just didn’t do it very well; his David Lynch aspirations got away from him.

Honestly, The Outwaters annoyed me immensely (it's a long time since a film has wound me up quite so much, for all the wrong reasons) and if nothing else is a sterling example of why, as a general rule (with a few exceptions), I find that "found footage" films suck.

Even ones that try to mask their lo-fi offerings as "cosmic horror".

Skinamarink (2022)

Experimental, arthouse horror Skinamarink is the kind of film to be experienced rather than necessarily followed as you would a more traditional movie.

Named after a nonsense playground chant from North America, the plot of this Canadian film - written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball - revolves around the travails of two seemingly abandoned young children, four-year-old Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his sister, six-year-old Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault).

The kids wake up in the middle of the night to discover all the windows and doors leading out of their home have disappeared, along with their father (Ross Paul) and mother (Jaime Hill).

Kevin and Kaylee decamp to the lounge and turn on the television to watch cartoons while they play with their toys.

Soon, though, they realise they are not alone in the house, and a strange, disembodied, voice starts speaking to them and making demands of them.

When Kaylee tries to challenge the omnipotent entity, she is punished, and it is left to her younger brother to wander through the 'haunted house' alone.

Shot almost entirely at a low angle, so that we are either taking the point-of-view of one of the young protagonists or simply seeing events unravel from their level, the disorientating film demands our attention from the moment it begins.

We barely glimpse the children - the adults we see even less - and it's usually just legs and feet, while the dialogue is a mixture of often mumbled, naturalistic, delivery and - when it's too quiet to properly make out - subtitles.

The only sounds we hear are diegetic, so there are long periods of near-silence where - if you've surrendered yourself to the movie experience - you start to subsume sounds from your own environment, until you can't tell what's happening in the movie and what's in the room with you.

Objects appear and disappear, one of the televised cartoons gets stuck in a loop, and eventually we see flashes of shapes and figures in the shadows, toys and video cassettes stuck to walls and the ceiling, blood splatters across the TV screen etc 

Lighting is also minimal, often coming just from the flickering of the TV screen or a child's torch,.

Combined with the faux retro patina of the film, and its 1995 setting, all these tricks give the film the aura of a proto-found footage/video nasty mixed with dream logic and early David Lynch stylings. 

Ball's obsession with the TV screen and the way objects flicker in and out of existence scream David Lynch and it wouldn't take much, if you were so inclined, to headcanon this slice of disturbing weirdness into the world of Twin Peaks.

If demons and the supernatural were real, I can't help believing that an actual encounter with a paranormal entity might be something akin to the experience of watching this movie: intense, unsettling, confusing, baffling, bewildering, and ultimately beyond our comprehension. 

There is no "stunt man in rubber suit" or slick CGI monster serving up jump scares. In a very Lovecraftian way, at its core, Skinamarink is clearly "something man was not meant to know". 

Nothing that happens is overtly explained, meaning Skinamarink is the ultimate montage movie; it is up to us to assemble our version of what's going on from the succession of images and sounds that Ball provides us with.

Depending on the personal baggage and preconceptions you bring to Skinamarink, it's either a terrifyingly immersive and psychological descent into a child's nightmare encounter with a demon or 105 minutes of laughably pretentious bullshit. Your mileage will vary.

Personally, I'm glad I watched this peculiar work of mad genius as I've never seen anything quite like it before, but I have no great desire to see it again in a hurry.

I was hooked by it as it played but the concentration required to fully absorb Skinamarink was rather draining.