Tinsman Road had its New York première at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, 17th Oct 2025
“We wish to thank the Lyle family for their trust during the making of this documentary,” reads the text that opens Robbie Banfitch’s latest feature Tinsman Road. “We chose to tell their story in its purest, most uncompromised form. It contains graphic material.”
Almost nothing in this statement is true – but like Banfitch’s previous The Outwaters (2022), Tinsman Road is constantly flirting with the boundary between truth and fiction. This is not a documentary, but a faux documentary. It is shot entirely with an intradiegetic camera (a 4:3 Mini DV), via a self-authenticating mode of filmmaking associated both with veridical reportage – and of course with first-person horror. While, unlike The Outwaters, this is not formally framed as found footage, there are, woven into its weft, found audio cassettes, found pictures and old family videos.
The latter belong – or belonged – to Noelle Lyle, whose absence is central to the film. For now, though, note that she has the same forename – but not surname – as Noelle Faccone who plays her in archival footage. Similarly Banfitch plays Noelle’s brother Robbie Lyle, and Banfitch’s actual mother Leslie Ann Banfitch plays Robbie’s mother Leslie Lyle, and other characters, like Heather (Heather Middleton) and Nancy (Nancy Bujnowski), also share the forename of their performers, while at least one, Keith Bixby, expressly shares his full name with the actor playing him. Here, in a film whose every scene is presented with overt naturalism, there is a certain slippage between what is real and what mere invention, performance and pretence.
Like Banfitch, Robbie Lyle has been living in Los Angeles as a filmmaker – but he returns to his family home in the backwoods of New Jersey near Stillwater to visit his mother for the first time in three years. During that time Robbie’s father has died, and his sister Noelle has disappeared in the woods off Tinsman Road, a thirty-minute drive away, never to be seen again. Robbie constantly films, perhaps hoping to uncover the truth of what happened to Noelle – although sorrowful, sleepwalking Leslie, who is convinced that her daughter is still haunting the house along with a more malevolent presence, suggests that Robbie instead “do a documentary on angels and spirits and signs”.
In fact, Tinsman Road will merge these documentary foci, as murder mystery and paranormal investigation converge around the location of the title (parts of which were shot at the real Shades of Death Road, linked to local folklore and said to be haunted). As Robbie interviews Heather, Nancy and other locals not just about Noelle’s disappearance but about their thoughts on ghosts and the afterlife (with even the local Jersey Devil getting namechecked), and as he himself starts to share his mother’s sense that there is something trying to make itself known in the house, he feels more and more compelled to retrace Noelle’s last known footsteps, guided in part by strange drawings and song recordings that Noelle has left behind at home.
What emerges is not unlike Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999) or Dutch Marich’s Horror in the High Desert (2021) or even Bobcat Goldthwait’s Willow Creek (2013), except that Robbie’s winter camping sojourn is as much a journey through grief, guilt and home truths as a quest for answers to mythic mysteries out in the beyond. For a horror film, this is long, building very slowly and not a little aimlessly towards its crisis point – and while fans of The Outwaters may already be inured to the meandering, lollygagging pace that Banfitch prefers, Tinsman Road lacks that feature’s freaky, fucked-up payoff, or even the graphicness promised by its own opening text. Instead we get a self-consciously mediated film whose layered fictions modulate real, raw loss, and the strange, isolated places to which it can take us.
strap: In Robbie Banfitch’s slow-burn faux documentary, a filmmaker returns home to retrace his missing sister’s last known footsteps
© Anton Bitel
