When the pandemic first hit, L.A. filmmaker Nate Strayer went back to Michigan to lock down with family. As COVID continued, he decided to make a film there. He flew out a cinematographer (Isabel C. Machado, also a producer), hired a couple of local Grand Rapids actors — one of them his sister — making their film debut, and rented a few local cabins that became empty during the pandemic. The result was his own odd little thriller, “Outlier.“
It’s about a woman (Jessica Denton) escaping her abusive boyfriend who gets help from a guy at a gas station (Thomas Cheslek) witnessing the abuse. He drives her away, lets her stay in his cabin until she can find a place. But soon enough it’s clear he doesn’t want her to leave at all.
A computer nerd, he keeps talking to some unseen colleague at work about her progress, knows way too much about her history and eventually becomes much more of a menace than the first boyfriend.
The understory is that she’s a guinea pig for a new program that identifies women vulnerable to abuse and tries to change them. This despite technology that amounts to a bluetooth earpiece circa 2001. As she rises up, sort of (which usually results in running blindly through the woods), and rebels against what is becoming an incarceration, her captor can only be proud even as he’s beaten.
It’s a slow story, meant to conjure dread, but it seems to occur in slow motion. The characters talk very slowly, and the go-to expression of Denton is hanging her mouth hanging open in outraged disbelief. We know how she’s feeling.