The Outwaters (2022) review

Four friends travel to the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video (perhaps something akin to Mazzy Star's "Fade Into You") but go missing, and all that remains is footage they recorded, which shows them terrified by the thunder and then by a man with an axe ... and demon worms.  It conveniently ignores addressing the most basic components as to how to tell a story, like who are these people and why should anyone care about them, with the first full hour consisting of randomly assembled clips of them hanging out (it's Millennial Narcissism) ... and then when it finally gets to the part where it's trying to startle the audience, it's mostly black screens accompanied by a small beam from a flashlight and lots of panting and screaming on the soundtrack.  I can see ways in which the aesthetic could be rendered effective, but it needed judicious trimming and a proper introduction - if this is a rough cut for better things to come, so be it.