61 min | TV-MA | July 10, 2025 | San Roku Ku
Two people, one forest, one day of shooting. The setup works. Almost nothing built on top of it does.
Hank Orion started writing Outsiders in 2014. It began as an alien invasion script and turned into a thriller about a couple in the woods. He shot it near London in 2015, lost most of the footage, and released what was left as a short. He shot it again as a feature in 2022. He shot it a third time with new actors for this version. The plot never changed. Nicole and Josh have been together six years. She is hiding something. He books a camping weekend in a remote English forest, and once they are out there she has to fight to get back. That is enough for a thriller. It does not need more.
Natasha Perry and William Wilson do not act like people who have known each other for six years. They act like two people who met that morning. The dialogue is the main reason. It is written to sound loose and offhand, and every line sounds rehearsed once and delivered cold. Perry improves in the back half. Once the script asks her to be scared instead of chatty, she is fine. Wilson has the harder part. Josh has to be likable early so the turn hurts later, and he is never likable, so the turn does not hurt. It just happens.
The one-day shoot is visible in every scene. The camera is handheld and shakes constantly. Scenes do not connect. Nicole turns Josh down because she is tired. The next shot they are lying in the grass mid-conversation. The shot after that they are inside the tent in full daylight. Nobody had time to fix any of it. Two things do work. The sound is clean. The forest ambience is recorded well, the music is sparse, and the long quiet stretches are the best parts of the film. The location is also good. Orion found the right woods and shot them late in the day when the light is low. When the actors stop talking, the movie looks like a real thriller.
There is a decent film in this material. It is about fear and paranoia and two people who cannot trust each other and cannot leave, which is what Orion says he was after. A rewritten script and a second shooting day would have gotten him most of the way there. This cut is the outline of that film. Orion clearly cares about it, and he kept going for ten years when most people would have stopped. That earned him a finished movie. It did not earn him a great one, but one more shoot with a cast that really has chemistry, or has time to get comfortable with each other, could make a world of difference.