Offseason (2021)

Following a letter that informs her the grave of her actress mother Ava (Melora Walters) has been desecrated in some way, and that her direct and personal involvement is needed, Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue) and her on-again off-again friend George (Joe Swanberg) make a long cross-country drive to the island where Ava is buried. It’s Ava’s birthplace as well as the one place in the world she never wanted to return to – not even dead. Strangely, her testament said otherwise.

During the summer months, the island is a tourist paradise but now, it’s just in the process of being completely shut down for the off-season. Even the bridge connecting it to the main land is going to be closed in a few hours, so Marie should finish her business as quickly as possible. Alas, that’s easier said than done, for the graveyard keeper who wrote to her is nowhere to be found, and the rest of the island population that’s still there is in turns weird, creepy, and somewhat threatening, or all three together. There’s clearly something wrong with the place beyond the feeling of desolation that comes with near-empty places that should be full of people, and worse: something seems to have lured Marie here for a reason.

The newest film by Mickey Keating seems to be rather divisive. I’m not all that surprised about this, for it’s a calm movie that only seems interested in its narrative as a framework to hang a series of moods and evocative set pieces on. So this is a film much more dominated by long shots of Donahue walking through foggy empty small town streets, or along a desolate beach right out of a BBC Ghost Story for Christmas or Messiah of Evil than it is by its minimalist horror plot. Which doesn’t mean there’s nothing at all to the handful of more straightforward sequences, nor that there’s no emotional resonance to Marie’s flashbacks to her mother’s deathbed confessions she took for delirium; rather, all of this feels part of Offseason’s evocation of mood through place.

This sort of thing is pretty much catnip to me, and even more so in a film that evokes (which really seems to be the central verb here in more than one way) films like the ones I’ve already mentioned as well as the mood of Fulci’s mid-period without the gore, the framing techniques of John Carpenter, and those parts of US local filmmaking from the 70s that found places like this film’s beach and small town for their stories to play out in. Offseason is part of a very specific lineage of films and books of the fantastic where islands and beaches are liminal places where the fantastic and the horrific enters human lives; Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth”, Messiah of Evil or Carpenter’s The Fog are just a part of this type of horror.

Because the desolate and the creepy often are, this is a rather astonishingly beautiful film (even more so given a small budget), framed and shot with a calm and elegance that I’ve not seen in Keating’s earlier film. These earlier films – as this one is as well - were all wonderful examples of how to make different aesthetic approaches a director’s own, but they were also usually intense to the border of hysteria, whereas Offseason seeks and finds a calmer way towards its own form of dread, one I find personally rather more enticing.

Donahue is pretty fantastic, too, not just because she’s suggesting a 70s indie horror heroine through look and style, but also because she’s so genuinely good at being present in the weirdness and desolation of Offseason’s world, moving through it and witnessing it with the appropriate confusion and horror but also with a certain poise that seems to suggest a kinship between her and these places. Which does make sense on a plot level, as well.

The only thing about the film that doesn’t quite resonate with me as strongly is that it explains slightly too much of what we’ve witnessed in the final couple of scenes, making the weird ever so slightly more mundane in the process. But that’s not a major problem, because it’s not a major kind of explanation, and so Offseason really leaves me a bit giddy about how good a film it is; at least for someone with my very specific tastes.