 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: They’re Outside • Year: 2020 • Country: UK • Director: Sam Casserly, Airell Anthony Hayles • Main cast: Christine Randall, Tom Wheatley, Emily Booth, Nicole Miners • Runtime: 83 minutes • Production company: The Haunted Cinema • TRAILER
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They’re Outside (2020) is one of those movies that look better when you read the synopsis than when you actually see it. Presented as a mostly found-footage film, a star Youtuber with his psychology channel goes to a house in the woods to try to cure a woman from her agoraphobia –you know, the anxiety disorder of people who feel their environment to be unsafe with no easy way to escape, so they stay locked home without ever stepping out–, and later he discovers the secrets behind her condition are way darker, unleashing a supernatural force, an urban legend.
The possibilities with this start point are promising, but sadly the film ends up only scratching the surface. Too much time setting up the mood and the tension and describing the characters and the situation, and at the end, the mysteries never get solved.
And that is a pity because the lousy psychologist played by Tom Wheatley deserved to die in the most brutal way almost since minute zero. Mean to his girlfriend and camera-woman played by Nicole Miners, arrogant with the patient played by Christine Randall, and always annoying with everything he had to say, he was the perfect example of an extremely bad professional. The kind of psychologist with more ego than craft to carry on with his profession, that had to become a shoddy social media star instead of a real practitioner.
That, for me, was the worst and most distressful aspect of the movie. The idiotic YouTube star and the fact that he never finds the horrifying fate he deserves. That was hurting. For the rest, the filmmakers chose to build a film based on the tension of the situation, a tension that grows slowly through a good amount of the running time, to explode at the end with a dark and scary trip to the woods. An insufficient treat, maybe.
They’re Outside (2020) is the debut feature film of Sam Casserly and Airell Anthony Hayles, and an aura of amateurism involves the whole film. That is not necessarily a bad thing, because debut films can bring a lot of fresh ideas to the scene, but here they mostly take the form of limitations. The same can be said about most of the main cast, except for Emily Booth in the supporting role of the agoraphobic girl’s best friend, an actress that became one of my young age erotic myths thanks to her participation in the movie Cradle of Fear (2001) and that I mostly lost track of her besides being spotted in Doghouse (2009), The Reverend (2011), or Inbred (2011). It was nice to see her again in a good performing shape after all these years.
In global terms, They’re Outside (2020) became a little bit of a disappointing watch. But after having second thoughts you realize the story has a good background and potential. It is also a story that holds more than what shows, so the mysteries remain out there. Because we think we are very safe in our cities and with our technology, but sometimes we forget the power of the forest. People had died lost in the forest for centuries, and that is not a myth or an urban legend. Spiritual, supernatural, or mundane, when all you see is trees then you must face the fact that your days are over and you’ll be a feast for wild animals.
Shit, how much I’d have loved the Green Eyes creature shattering the idiotic Youtuber guy into a million pieces.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt9733886
