ll is well in the sleepy town of Granite Falls, Washington. The silent two-decade mission of a schoolteacher reaches completion as her ex-student, granted early parole after twenty years, gazes out the window from the passenger seat of his brother’s truck. What follows is a pragmatic tale of extraordinary relationships, personal discovery, and mundane yet monumental mistakes. This, folks, is Outside In—informally known as the “Granite Falls movie.”
This Indie drama, currently available on Netflix and Prime Video, hinges on recently paroled thirty-eight-year-old Chris Conelly’s relationship with Carol Beasely, the earnest high school teacher who had fought to free him on the basis that he hadn’t committed the crime he was convicted for. Their shared history is clear from their first meeting in the movie. With Carol’s failing marriage and Chris’s lack of other connections, the two maintain a bond that is tested by their environment and mistakes.
Despite the fact that the bulk of its footage was shot over just a twenty-day period in 2016, the film manages to paint an indelicate, unabashed picture of the small towns of the Pacific Northwest, with Granite Falls as its poster child. There’s no attempt to sanitize us into being another quaint little scenic town; rather, the aged, dingy roots of Granite Falls are exposed in full. Long shots of our forgotten alleys, run-down mobile homes, cracked concrete buildings, and—as many of us can surely agree—borderline derelict middle school (which in this movie is still the high school) are central. Chris is isolated by this town, portrayed in this movie as a worn community small enough to remember him yet large enough to go on without him. Twenty years and he is a free man, trapped now in a small world that has completely passed him by, and yet again, it’s only Carol he has to turn to. The setting is honest to the real world: just about every scene that takes place in Granite Falls really is filmed there. It’s amazing to watch and recognize the location of nearly every scene.
Yet despite its strong start and masterful cinematography, Outside In’s flaws soon become apparent. The plot stumbles on account of Chris’s poor writing and utterly witless dialogue. The middle of the film grows stale: it’s time after time of Chris doing something stupid and illogical to Carol’s immediate forgiveness. I was brought to thinking that each next turn would result in some sort of wider plot progression. The middle portion of the movie functions instead as an over-extended montage of Chris making mistakes to relatively little consequence. You could have snipped out half an hour between the first and last ten minutes and ended up with more or less the same movie. I mean, this is the stuff your soap-opera-loving grandma would watch. She’d eat it right up, clutching her kitschy hand-sewn throw pillows at every dramatically stale plot beat. This segment of the film is punctuated by a quick and messy launch back into motion as it seems to realize it’s squandered the majority of its runtime. Carol finally puts her foot down and, at Chris’ suggestion, they spend one final day together in Everett, crashing with him at a motel, after which they decide to throw in the towel on their relationship.
Outside In stands shakily on its own as a sentimental yet ultimately forgettable film. Though it’s a shame the film about us is so stagnant, its familiar setting warrants it a watch.
