“Outpost” only succeeds if we are invested in Kate’s trajectory and ultimate fate, and I never was. Dover never quite figures out this complicated character, a fatal flaw that makes Kate a pawn in the script instead of a fully-realized role. Unreliable narrators are tough roles because the performer has to play distrust in what we usually know to be true-what we can see with our own eyes. Part of the problem is how the writing reduces Kate to a series of shocked reaction shots as she sees things that may or may not be there. Lo Truglio draws interesting performances from his clearly talented supporting cast-props to Becky Ann Baker, too-but he can’t quite get Dover where she needs to be to make this part work. With Kate trapped in a remote location and growing increasingly unstable, I half-wondered if this was Lo Truglio’s COVID allegory. She’s unsure if she can trust the only local in the area, a widower named Reggie ( Dylan Baker), and her superiors-Earl ( Ato Essandoh) and Dan ( Dallas Roberts)-question if she’s up for the job.

There are hints from the beginning that something is very broken in Kate, as she keeps seeing violent visions that seem to increase in intensity. Of course, Kate will overcome her trauma and maybe even save the day. She’s wrong.Īt first, “Outpost” feels like a traditional recovery or empowerment narrative. Kate thinks being alone-away from the potential threat she sees in every stranger’s eyes-will rid her of the bad things. She gets a job at a remote outpost where solo operators scan the horizon for forest fires and record things like days since the last rain and relative humidity for the officials. And Kate takes this cursed feeling to the middle of nowhere to deal with her trauma.

There’s a sense after a traumatic event that someone is cursed, that bad things find them. We don’t know much of the details of the attack in her own home, but we hear parts of it in the open and see flashes represented as trauma across Kate’s face. “Bad things find me.” So says Kate ( Beth Dover, Lo Truglio’s real-life wife), a woman who has been through something intensely violent and traumatic.

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