The Outwaters — avant-garde odyssey with a cosmic hint of Kubrick

Lord, save us from the found footage horror movie. A curse of the digital age to rival Elon Musk, the genre has long squeezed every last drop of juice from the purported iPhones of missing persons. So you will surely be tempted to skip The Outwaters, whose own supposed memory cards recount the vanishing of four hapless millennials in the Mojave Desert. And yet as the quartet attempt to shoot a music video in the parched sunscape, we too stumble into something unexpected.

To explain what follows would risk spoilers. More to the point, literally describing the games the film plays with extremes of light and dark, sonic hums and shards of image, would probably fail to capture how unnerving they can be. Quizzical mules peer at the camera early on, and again near the finale. Between comes a looping odyssey more akin to avant-garde video art than conventional horror. (Though the viscera that do appear will certainly spoil breakfast.)

Lacing the scramble too with a cosmic hint of Stanley Kubrick, director and star Robbie Banfitch touches on something truly nightmarish. If the film can be repetitious, it might also introduce a striking new voice. The same one you hear on-screen, in fact, delivering a hard-to-shake line: “My head is raining.”

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from April 7