You don’t see found footage films like The Outwaters very often. Inspired from some of the subgenre’s highly rated stalwarts, notably The Blair Witch Project, Willow Creek, writer/director/cinematographer Robbie Banfitch infuses a sense of expressionism and surrealism in a film that begins as a slice-of-life drama and ends up in a realm of madness and cosmic horror. What elevates the film, though, is that he takes the basics of the found footage subgenre and presses further than most (if any) are willing to go, marrying art and stunningly unearthly cinematography with an ethos of “...what did I just see?!” madness.

After an intense and confusing 911 call from hell where the operator is assaulted with screams of agony and despair, The Outwaters explains that a group of four people vanished in the Mojave desert in 2017. In 2022, their memory cards were discovered and the footage is presented as a raw video/sound file of the chronological events found on the cards.

The film uses the numbered camera cards as chapters and begins with Robbie (Robbie Banfitch) giving his brother Scott (Scott Schamell) a backpack and a bandana that belonged to their father as well as a necklace made by their mother (Leslie Ann Banfitch) for his birthday. It’s a tender moment that suggests some family friction between Scott and his mother, a subtle undertone that continues through the film. The first half of The Outwaters plays almost like a slice-of-life dramedy, as Robbie preps to shoot a music video for his friend Michelle (Michelle May) in the Mojave Desert. Along the way, he flies across the country to visit his mom and meets up with his childhood friend Ange (Angela Basolis), who he convinces to come along to style Michelle.

Once they end up in the Mojave desert, elements of The Blair Witch Project and Willow Creek shine through in the prep and the initial filming for the music video. Here, the story cements the characters and their relationships before ultimately putting everything through the wringer. The shooting style changes from more up-close, urban to pure nature, capturing the Mojave Desert in its alien majesty. It’s location porn at its finest, but Robbie also plays with mirror imagery and uses his cinematography to make everything feel alternately warm and somewhat disconcertingly cold.

Intermingling with the stunning scenery, earthquakes and lightning-less claps of thunder add to the ominous atmosphere percolating under the surface of their pleasant trip. At night, the dark sky is ripped by thunderous booms and ants mill about the cracked night ground. “The hair on my entire body is sticking up,” someone says, while Robbie mentions that “the air feels, like, shimmery” and the ground hums as if there’s current running underneath it.

Eventually, the veneer of the slice-of-life drama is stripped away like a layer of skin and things turn violent and horrifying at a moment’s notice. It’s here that The Outwaters begins to twist the knife, obliterating the characters’ (and our) understanding of the universe and even the nature of time and space. It’d be cruel to reveal where the story ultimately goes as it steps fully into horror, but the last half of the film becomes a grueling nightmare that mixes surrealist shots that turn the Mojave Desert into an almost alien dreamscape with disturbing and otherworldly imagery punctuated with moments of shocking violence.

It’s a surrealist painting brought to life, but one in which we’re not privy to the full picture. Robbie uses darkness so vast that a flashlight can only illuminate portions; as if we’re witnessing a nightmarish painting but only through brief bursts of light. It’s intentionally confusing and discombobulating and when The Outwaters shows its hand, it does so in frightening fragments that somehow make it more horrifying.

It’s as if the film peels away the illusion of the world and lets its characters see the cosmic and, yes, eldritch horrors awaiting just beyond. It’s things that no human was meant to witness or understand, as if we’ve entered a mirror world of madness that we are incapable of fathoming. The earlier landscape porn flips in horrifying and discombobulating directions, turning upside down and inverting in nauseating ways.

The Outwaters lingered in my mind for days after watching it because the horror comes from things barely seen, using bits of striking imagery that the mind traps almost like a picture. It doesn’t give easy answers, instead allowing the viewer to just soak up the nightmarish visuals and jump at the impeccably created sound design. This is a film that demands to be seen in a dark theater where the cacophony of booming thunder and the screams of humans and…other things…can rend the silence.

Where most found footage films end, The Outwaters pushes through, taking us on a monstrous and unearthly odyssey through madness. It’s a surprising and vicious film and one of the best found footage films I’ve seen in a long time. The filmmaking is so assured and idiosyncratic in its chaotic cinematography and inventive in its design that, with its small budget, The Outwaters heralds Robbie Banfitch as a filmmaker to watch.