The Outwaters (2023)★★★☆☆

I feel like this movie had a lot of really interesting potential and visual effects, but didn’t quite land the “scary story” piece quite as well as it could have.

(Probably spoilers) Most of the truly scary stuff happens in spurts and flashlight glances. You can see there’s a lot of blood and gore, and clearly some scary stuff is going down, but you don’t really see that scary stuff.

Also, I generally like found footage films, but the shaky camerawork in this one was almost too much for me. Maybe that’s intentional - it certainly did well at disorienting me. But that kind of disorientation doesn’t translate to tension or terror for me.

Ultimately, there’s some interesting stuff here, but I didn’t find the story as it was told terribly compelling, and it was at times hard to follow. That said, for an almost two-hour movie, it didn’t feel particularly long! So that’s a point in its favor, I guess.