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.

Three Films Make A Post: Want to watch another?

Karen Doesn’t Dream (2018): At its core, this indie production by Zach Huckaby is pretty typical of that movie space, concerning itself with its protagonist Karen’s (Jessica Lynn Skinner) struggles with grief, mental illness, poverty and insomnia, which, apart from Thanksgiving dinners and “coming-of-age” in the 80s, are the main safe spaces of this kind of film.

Huckaby adds quite a few non-realist touches to the film, though, not necessarily just there to emphasise Karen’s deteriorating mental state, giving the film an obliquely dream-like quality that fits something whose main character watches video tapes of people sleeping to find sleep of her own.

Sadistic Intentions (2019): Staying with an indie movie, but moving on to indie horror, Eric Pennycoff’s film sees a woman named Chloe (Taylor Zaudtke) drawn into a game of sadism, murder, bad metal and a pretty fucked-up idea of romance. The film’s pleasantly slow beginning is – as is most of the film, really – carried by Zaudtke and Jeremy Gardner’s chemistry, as well as helped along by a tone that seems at once sardonic and empathetic towards the characters, providing the film an excellent basis for later developments when things become rather unpleasant for everyone involved.

It’s a lovely little film that finds the right point between being nasty and funny, and does a couple of actually unexpected and interesting things with/to its characters.

The Other Lamb (2019): Let’s end on a very impressive movie I have surprisingly little to say about, Malgorzata Szumowska’s film about a female cult and their male leader coming up on the late stage of utter destruction even the more stable cults eventually can’t help but reach. It’s incredibly acted (not just by lead Raffey Cassidy), visually strikingly and meaningfully composed, starting from a starkly naturalistic place but always reaching for the mythical, and about as powerful a film about young women conquering male-induced terrors as one could imagine. Despite being pretty heavy on the symbolism, it’s also a film not really made to be simply interpreted and cut open to examine its guts – it’s so well-constructed and nearly hypnotically dense and tense, you’ll come to the same conclusions by experiencing it, which rather speaks to the director’s artistry.


Prospective viewers shouldn’t go in expecting the horror film some of the marketing material promises; this is incredible arthouse fare that uses some elements horror movies might use, but is really not interested in the specific kicks we tend to look for in horror, even slow horror.

After Midnight (2019)

Abby (Brea Grant), the life and work partner of small town bar owner Hank (Jeremy Gardner, who also co-directs), suddenly disappears from their house, leaving behind a note that’s too vague for a goodbye note but also not exactly promising a quick return. Hank loses himself in memories of better times, when things between the couple were simple because they were young and very acutely in love, so problem fields we’ll learn about later like Abby’s hatred of small town life and Hank’s own troubles with change and making decisions about his life didn’t really come up.

His bout of depression isn’t the only thing haunting Hank right now, though, for ever since Abby went away, he has had nightly visits by some kind of creature that wants to get into his – as is traditional – middle-of-nowhere house and clearly wants to do him harm. Not surprisingly, nobody in town believes any of Hank’s wild tales about the creature, so he has to try to fight it off alone, increasingly losing his grip on his sanity while doing so. How that’s going to turn out if and when Abby should return, and what will all of this do to their relationship?

For the longest time, I wasn’t at all sure about Jeremy Gardner’s and Christian Stella’s horror and romance movie After Midnight, feeling rather sceptical that the leisurely pace would ever let the film arrive at anything amounting to a point, and not too keen on watching yet another guy in a movie having very much self-caused relationship troubles, with a monster that only seemed to be in there to be a somewhat strained metaphor. Slowly, though, I began to appreciate how well, and sometimes funnily, the film drew Hank and his world, how elegantly the directors already implicated all the things that would become Abby’s and Hank’s relationship troubles in Hank’s happy flashbacks, just without Hank and the audience noticing at the time.

Once Abby returns, the film very much proves that all of what came before did indeed have a point, with some wonderful dialogue scenes now talking about the difficulties of love and relationships once the endorphin-driven parts of it are over and the parts start that can be rather a lot like work, Grant and Gardner doing great jobs keeping this believable, lively and real. Here, the film isn’t making the classic mistake of making one of the two the asshole of the relationship, even though it is clearly Hank who has to change if he wants to continue with Abby, instead working on letting the audience understand where each one is coming from; very atypical for a film from the last couple of years, it’s not about judgement and who is in the wrong but about what kind of compromise is viable for these two to stay together.

After that, the film makes utterly lovely use of a standard romance trope in an awkward family dinner scene that had me smiling like a loon, adds the perfect jump scare, and ends in a way that makes it impossible not to realize that the early film’s lengths were indeed in there for a reason, slowly preparing the ground for the rest of the film and trusting in the audience to be patient and have a bit of trust.


In the end, After Midnight, turns out to be the best horror/romance combo since Benson and Moorhead’s Spring (another film that takes a bit of time preparing the viewer). And wouldn’t you know it, those guys produced this film, Benson also taking an acting turn as Abby’s somewhat asshat-ish sheriff brother. That’s the perfect company for what turns out to be a quietly excellent little movie.

In short: Bliss (2019)

Painter Dezzy (Dora Madison) is suffering from a bad case of artist’s block that has left her unable to paint anything for quite some time now, which in turn leaves her unable to pay her bills. Dezzy’s life is a huge mess, and she’s clearly one of those artists who believe that good art can only come from the ecstasy of self-ruination, so what better way to recapture her creative spirit than go on a giant bender.

Once she tries a new drug called “bliss”, things get a bit weirder than on your usual drug bender, though, and she is plagued by intense hallucinations, even more aggressive mood swings than seem typical for her anyway, as well as a violent lust for blood that makes a woman’s social life rather problematic. On the positive side, her creativity is rekindled.

After the pretty great The Mind’s Eye and its attempt to make something like Cronenberg’s Scanners but more ecstatic and more like an old school VHS cover, Bliss with its intense, colour-drenched phantasmagorical bad drug trip visuals must have seemed like the logical next step to take for director Joe Begos. For my tastes at least, the way the film visually and acoustically assaults the viewer with colours and noises as if it were directed by Gaspar Noé’s more unhinged brother is quite the success, turning the resulting film into something very special indeed.

As a blood-drenched meditation (if you can call something that screams in your face for eighty minutes a “meditation”) on the vagaries of art and the joys and horrors of self-destruction, and the kind of vampirism that’s nasty like cannibalism instead of sexy like a teen vampire, this is quite the film, throwing itself at an audience with the same abandon as Dezzy at drugs or a throat, and Madison at her role, for that matter. I’m not generally a big fan of the “artists need to suffer” theory of art, but one doesn’t have to be to find something of interest in the film, for Dezzy is neither being shown as a role model nor as a clear cautionary tale. Bliss is simply conveying intensities, moods and ideas concerning this theme and letting the battered viewer sort it out all for themselves.


With this the film may rub quite a few viewers the wrong way, I imagine, presenting pretty much the opposite of slow horror yet also spitting blood in the face of fun horror only out for “scares”, and probably also alienating quite a few viewers through its sheer aesthetic abandon. But then, I really cannot see how else Begos could have told this particular tale quite this effectively without going all out in all kinds of ways. I’m very happy he did.