The Outwaters is what happens when someone watches The Blair Witch Project and says, “Cool, but what if we go full cosmic breakdown and never give the audience a safety rail?” Written, directed, produced, edited, and partially suffered-through by Robbie Banfitch, this 2022 found-footage horror film is not here to hold your hand. It’s here to drop you in the Mojave Desert with four friends, three memory cards, and one long, spiraling descent into audiovisual madness. And somehow, it absolutely works.
Found Footage, But Make It Unhinged
On paper, this sounds familiar: a group of friends—Robbie, Angela, Scott, and Michelle—head into the desert in 2017 to shoot a music video. Years later, they’re missing, and all that remains are memory cards recovered from the Mojave. We’ve seen this setup before: “the following footage was found,” etc. But The Outwaters quietly mutates the trope.
At first, the footage feels almost mundane: birthdays, family visits, drunken nights, shaky car rides, artistic enthusiasm. It’s found footage as life-log—soft, messy, almost boring in stretches. And that’s part of the magic: it lulls you into a false sense of normalcy, so when the film finally rips the floor open, it feels like someone took a sledgehammer to your frontal lobe.
The Calm Before the Cosmic
The early sections are deceptively chill. Robbie prepping equipment, Scott cracking jokes, Angela vibing, Michelle talking about her late mother. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy tucked inside the party footage, especially as Michelle’s grief peeks through. Two earthquakes, recorded from Robbie’s apartment, feel like stray footage at first—until you realize they’re foreshadowing: the tectonic plates of reality have already started shifting, and nobody got the memo.
These quiet, slightly aimless moments are crucial. They let the characters breathe and feel like real people instead of monster chow. By the time things go to hell, you don’t want any of them to be there—which is exactly why they must be.
Into the Mojave, Where Nothing Is Okay
Once the group hits the desert, the film starts playing its long con. There’s still sun, music-video planning, and joking around. Then come the donkeys blocking the road, the beautiful but oppressive landscape, the first night camping, and the ominous booms and animal noises echoing in the dark.
It’s a slow escalation: strange sounds, off-kilter energy, that subtle “we’re not alone” instinct the human brain picks up before logic can explain it away. When Robbie walks toward that strobing light on the hillside, you already know he’s made the worst decision in recorded history—but you also know you’d do the same, because humans are curious and very bad at staying in the tent.
When the Lights Go Out and the Universe Gets Weird
From the moment the mysterious light and the high-pitched noises in the earth show up, The Outwaters starts loosening its grip on linear reality. Robbie notes his camera battery hasn’t dropped at all. An axe appears inexplicably on a hill. The spooky noises that once seemed like “maybe coyotes?” start invading the soundscape like a signal from another dimension.
And then the naked man with the axe arrives. We never get a cozy explanation for him—no backstory, no monologue, no “he was part of an experiment.” He’s just there, something feral and wrong, and he hits Robbie hard enough to knock his brain—and the film—sideways. From this point forward, The Outwaters stops caring about your need for clarity. In a good way. In a very, very disturbing way.
Fragmented Time, Shredded Sanity
After that attack, the narrative snaps. One moment Robbie is staggering back to camp, covered in blood; the next, we’re plunged into chaos—screaming, running, disjointed images, the girls begging for their lives. Then we’re alone with Robbie, naked and confused, stumbling through a desert that no longer behaves like a place governed by physics.
This is where the movie becomes something special. Instead of clean, “this happened, then this” storytelling, we get shards: worm-like creatures writhing in the sand, grotesque glimpses of viscera, flickers of impossible spaces. The desert feels infinite and enclosed at the same time, like a maze built out of time loops and migraine auras.
Cosmic Horror on a Memory Card
The genius of The Outwaters is how it uses the limitations of found footage to suggest something enormous, incomprehensible, and actively hostile. The camera can only capture what’s directly in front of it: flashes of red liquid, white lights, creatures glimpsed for half a second, the wing of a plane, the inside of a home, the same people in different states of being alive and not.
Rather than explaining what these entities are or what the red pool represents, the film traps you in Robbie’s POV as his reality collapses. That’s where the Lovecraftian element comes in—not in tentacles and ancient texts, but in the feeling that your tiny human brain was never designed to process what is happening. Robbie vomiting blood and digging an unknown foreign object out of his foot feels less like “infection” and more like “reality patch update failed.”
Fleshy Worms and Government Signs: Always a Great Combo
The longer Robbie wanders, the worse it gets. The screaming fleshy worms infesting the ground look like something between parasites and embryonic horrors, and they behave like the desert’s ugly little antibodies. Robbie finds a gas mask, an old sign indicating a government-restricted area, and you start to suspect that humanity once tried to fence this place off and then quietly decided, “You know what? Let’s just never talk about that again.”
The appearance of Robbie’s possible doppelgänger as his assailant adds another layer of dread. Is he being hunted by himself from a different timeline? Is he the monster in someone else’s footage? That ambiguity is deliciously awful.
Time Loops, Donkeys, and Deeply Bad Decisions
One of the film’s most unsettling touches is the way it loops back on itself. Robbie sees his group arriving in the desert, as if he’s become a ghost in his own past. He glimpses Michelle running, blood-soaked. He walks into his mother’s house, onto an airplane wing, and back to camp over and over.
The timeline folds in on itself like a dying star. Cause and effect blur. The only constant is suffering—and the donkeys, who apparently got a permanent backstage pass to this interdimensional meltdown.
The Body Horror You’ll Never Unsee
By the time we reach the final stretch, The Outwaters has fully committed to its vision of cosmic, bodily, and psychological ruin. Robbie finds the decomposing heads of his friends on pikes, as if some other presence decided to decorate. Then he discovers a large tooth and uses it to sever his own penis and disembowel himself, reaching up toward the sun like he’s either ascending or glitching out of the human experience entirely.
It’s shocking, grotesque, and undeniably extreme—but it fits the trajectory. This isn’t edginess for its own sake; it feels like the endpoint of a man whose body and mind have been chewed up by something impossible. In a horribly funny way, it’s the ultimate “I’m not okay” status update.
A Niche Nightmare, But a Powerful One
The Outwaters is absolutely not for everyone. It’s noisy, disorienting, and refuses to explain itself. If you need clean resolutions, you will hate it. If you get motion sickness, your soul may leave your body. But if you’re into horror that feels like a full-on sensory assault, a descent into madness filmed from inside the madness, it’s a quietly remarkable achievement.
Robbie Banfitch takes the found-footage format and pushes it until it breaks, then keeps filming the splinters. The performances feel natural, the early camaraderie makes the later horror hurt, and the desert becomes one of the most terrifying “locations” in recent horror—not because of what we know is there, but because of how little we ever truly see.
Final Verdict: Four Memory Cards and a Screaming Void
In the end, The Outwaters is less a movie you watch and more an experience you endure. In the best way. It’s abrasive, ambitious, deeply weird, and surprisingly moving in its portrait of four ordinary people swallowed by something extraordinary and cruel.
If your idea of a good time is being dropped into a cosmic blender of light, sound, and body horror, this is one desert trip you won’t forget—no matter how much you might want to.
