The Outwaters (2022) feels more like an art film from days of materialist filmmaking than a piece of narrative cinema.
I’m sure I’ve watched the same concept in a different context, probably at the London Filmmaker’s Co-op before it merged with London Video Arts and became LUX. I have indistinct memories of sitting in a classroom sized warehouse with boarded up windows, as details of a landscape, picked out with a spotlight, flicker on screen.
What narrative there is gets framed as found footage, or more accurately found memory cards. The unedited footage details the disappearance of four people who travelled into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video. But the desert is not a friendly place. First unearthly sounds haunt the night, then the silhouette of a man holding an axe appears on the horizon.
The second half of the film is an escalating chaos of abstract images, jump cuts and strange camera angles, revealing frantic glimpses of the desert as a bloody crime scene, accompanied by a soundtrack of screams and distressed atmospherics, all designed to overwhelm the viewer.
The film’s lead Robbie Banfitch also produced, wrote, directed, edited, and designed the sound for the film. For me, this takes the idea of subjective filmmaking, inherent in all first person found footage movies, to new levels of subjectiveness. His is the kind of multi-disciplinary approach more favoured by gallery artists.
This in turn makes me wonder about context. How you understand the film depends on where you see it. Screened in a cinema it’s one thing, shown in a room at Tate Modern it’s something else, and streamed to your television makes it something altogether different. Unfortunately I’m not sure watching it at home was really the place to see it for the first time. In this context it’s hard not to accuse Banfitch of being chaotic and a little self-indulgent.
