She also has a variety of chances to escape but doesn’t; her captor is cloyingly civil to her and never exhibits any sexual menace. There is a moment when you wonder whose point of view we should believe. Is she just freaking out and imagining things? But about the time he chains her feet it’s clear he’s way beyond doing this for her own good.
A first time feature for nearly everyone involved, it plays like a better-than-usual student film and nearly reaches a professional level through the effective score of Ahmed Arifin.
Sometimes, when backed into a corner by limitations, filmmakers can come up with very creative solutions they wouldn’t have thought of in the first place. Here, two crew quarantined with two actors dredged up just another woman in peril saga you’d see every night on bad TV. The whole sci-fi angle never really reaches the surface.
Worse, Strayer started to think of the story in terms of the pandemic itself. “All her decisions are dictated for her until she finds the courage to figure out who she is herself and make her own decisions after the pressure of being gaslit becomes too much,” he says in a director’s statement, as if endorsing the flouting of government mask mandates or allowing one to do one’s “own research” before taking the vaccine. How’d that work out in Michigan? It ranks 10th nationally in total COVID deaths, at nearly 27,000 fatalities. A far more chilling outcome than anything hinted in the ineffective “Outlier.”
“Outlier” is available on streaming platforms iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play and Xbox.