Outlier
What do a room full of computers, a cabin on a lake, an abusive boyfriend, strange nightmares, a white pickup truck, onions, and films made during pandemic lock down all have in common? You will find out over the course of Outlier’s 80 some odd minutes and like most pandemic films the outcome will be only moderately successful. Whether the answers given are fully satisfying is up to the individual viewer, but there are good ideas aplenty in Nick Strayer’s abuse-and-trauma thriller. There is also a fair amount of recycled and cliched ideas in order to play up thriller aspects which ultimately do more harm than good. And as much as anyone tries to change that fact, it remains as unwavering as the setting sun on a calm lake.
Starting off as an uncomfortable scene between Olivia (Denton) and her longtime boyfriend, Outlier soon makes the undercurrent behind that discomfort clear. Trapped in a long cycle of emotional and probably physical abuse, Olivia is distrusting of everything around her, cut off from her family and unable to break free. That cycle is finally broken when the confrontation is broken up by the well-meaning Thomas who takes her to his idyllic cabin to rest and recuperate. Even as he moves slowly to keep her calm and collected small things begin to stick out to her – strange conversations in the night, bad dreams, Thomas’ reading of her mail and inability to offer a phone or external communication – until she suspects she has escaped one prison for another.
Even for a very brief film that’s not a lot of plot, but it also can’t really be as the requirements of shooting during a lockdown mean a small number of actors and locations where potential exposure can be controlled. On the one hand, judging a film beyond what it specifically offers isn’t fair to films not made under the same conditions. On the other hand, it’s impossible to understand a film removed from its context (even if that context is never specifically mentioned), which is why the most successful pandemic films like Locked Down have overtly included that context in their setups. Outlier wants to have its cake and eat it to, reducing itself to a two-character interplay without offering any reason for such a thing beyond what it can create for itself. The instinct to turn that into grist for psychological thrills is a logical one yet Outlier doesn’t do enough with the concept.
The nature of lockdown films is to turn them essentially into stage plays, contests of will staged through interesting dialogue. Outlier has half of that as Olivia tries more and more to get at what Thomas plans to do and what ultimately drives him, helped along by fantastic performance from Denton. But the script is not strong enough to be more than that as it attempts to build tension while holding off its biggest twists till the end without realizing that twists need some sort of investment to be worthwhile. Instead, what momentum Outlier has is lost as its light plot is dragged out longer than it needs to be even over a reduced running time.
It’s all the more apparent as no one is around to break up the duel between Denton and Cheslek and Thomas himself is written as barely functional, offering only brief staccato bursts of exposition but locking away his inner processes until far too late. Nor are the final reveals quite enough to live up to the hints and teases offered earlier on.
It’s hard to make any film and it’s even harder to make one with only two actors and minimal plot movement for them to hold on to. It’s been done, and done well, but not often. The films that made it work were the real outliers. This one is unfortunately more standard for the experiment. A fantastic performance from Jessica Denton elevates it, but not enough to overcome an unformed screenplay.