OFFSEASON (2021)

Studio:      Shudder/RLJE Films
Director:    Mickey Keating
Writer:      Mickey Keating
Producer:  Eric B. Fleischman, Maurice Fadida
Stars:     Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters, Jeremy Gardner

Review Score:

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Summary:

The desecration of her mother’s grave draws a woman to a mysterious island whose odd residents appear to be cursed by a demonic force.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Chapter 1: Lone Palm – Via letter, cemetery caretaker Haskell Grierson summons Marie Aldrich to Lone Palm Beach with an urgent notice that her mother Ava’s grave was desecrated. Marie’s estranged boyfriend George Darrow accompanies her. The ‘Bridge Man’ warns that the island is closed to tourists until Spring, and the couple will need to return to the mainland before the bridge goes up for the season at nightfall.

George leaves Marie alone in the cemetery while he searches for the caretaker. Marie has a cryptic encounter with Miss Emily, an old woman who runs the flower shop in town. Marie wanders into a foggy forest where entranced people seem to surround her. Marie flees and reunites with George.

Chapter 2: Sandtrap – Marie and George stop at a restaurant to ask where they can find Grierson. The locals treat the couple oddly. Marie meets a fisherman who hints that he can help Marie. The fisherman begins offering information about Marie’s mother until other locals interrupt.

Unable to locate Grierson, Marie and George return to the road. Marie tells George she suspects her mother’s will was altered because Ava always insisted she never wanted to return to Lone Palm Beach. Marie recounts a tale Ava told about the island’s settlers making a deal with a demon who came from the sea in exchange for surviving rough storms. Ava claimed their family was part of the pact, but Marie assumed the story was a figment of Ava’s dementia. George condescendingly dismisses Marie’s concerns that something might actually be wrong with Lone Palm Beach, and that they may have fallen for a trap.

George and Marie find the road back to the bridge blocked by fallen trees. George crashes his car in the dark when he tries driving around the trees.

Chapter 3: Life’s a Dream – While unconscious, Marie flashes back to getting nowhere with a pair of lawyers when she tried disputing the terms of Ava’s will. Marie wakes in the crashed car to find George missing and the bridge raised.

Marie looks for help in town only to discover it is eerily deserted. Marie experiences another flashback where she argues with her mother over the supposed truth about the island.

Chapter 4: The Damned – At the flower shop, Marie finds a scrapbook of clippings about her mother. Marie also encounters Miss Emily standing entranced with white eyes. Marie returns to the restaurant and sees all of the locals standing strangely still like statues.

Chapter 5: Last Man Out – Marie runs into the fisherman. He confirms that the island’s inhabitants are cursed. He also explains that Ava had to return there because, like everyone else trapped there, she owed a debt to the man from the sea. The fisherman adds that each year, one resident remains awake, and he made sure it would be him this time.

The fisherman takes Marie to retrieve his boat, but he disappears once they are inside his house. Marie makes contact with George over a radio and vows to find him. Marie then discovers tentacles devouring the fisherman in the dark. When the fisherman transforms into a possessed creature, Marie fires a flare gun that sends the house up in flames.

Marie escapes to the raised bridge. Covered in blood, George confronts Marie. Marie realizes George is possessed when he speaks to her cryptically. Marie shoots George after he menacingly moves toward her.

Marie breaks into the booth to lower the bridge. Hearing creatures coming from the fog behind her, Marie runs toward the mainland until the Bridge Man stops her at gunpoint. The Bridge Man tells Marie that her mother did terrible things and “He” wants Marie to see what happens as a consequence. The Bridge Man further explains that he serves the townspeople because he is desperate for salvation. Marie tells the Bridge Man he was deceived, and that Lone Palm Beach is Hell, not Heaven.

Chapter 6: Heaven – Unswayed by Marie’s claim, the Bridge Man forces Marie to return to the cemetery. There, Marie encounters her resurrected mother. Ava suddenly sprints to the beach.

Marie sees a massive monster appear on the distant horizon. Marie screams, “I’m sorry” as her mother is dragged into the water. Entranced townspeople appear behind Marie. Marie says, “I see now” before her eyes turn white with possession.

Another flashback shows Marie speaking to Ava on her mother’s deathbed. Ava reveals she had an older brother, who turns out to have been the fisherman. Ava recounts an unsettling experience involving her supposedly dead brother becoming possessed, which causes Ava to insist she never wants to return to Lone Palm Beach, even in death.

Epilogue – A couple prepares to leave Lone Palm Beach at the end of another tourist season. As the new proprietor of the flower shop, Marie warns them about staying past the bridge closure. Miss Emily is revealed to have been Marie’s grandmother.

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Review:

I boarded the bandwagon for indie auteur Mickey Keating when he put out “Pod” in 2015 (review here). Keating’s take on a classic conspiracy theory thriller combined alien aspects of “The X-Files” with the paranoia of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to produce a slim yet sleek sci-fi/horror movie that repositioned the director for a promising career in genre filmdom.

My enthusiasm for Keating’s work took a hit with his Lauren Ashley Carter-led follow-up in 2016. As a “descent into madness” character study, “Darling” (review here) mostly meandered into ambiguous arthouse territory. With minimal dialogue, a scant runtime, and black-and-white visuals, “Darling” was such a skeleton that bared bones exposed it as a stream-of-consciousness endeavor with no distinctive destination for its dreary dreaminess.

The exploitation era grit powering “Carnage Park” (review here) bounced back toward more commercial appeal a few months later. But the wheels wobbled off the wagon again the following year. 2017’s “Psychopaths” (review here) was a bland bowl of ponderous porridge with the unappetizing taste you’d expect of another off-the-cuff effort splashing forward without a rudder. By this time I wondered if Keating would ever get a grip on a discernible style that wasn’t based on using a quick script and hurried shoot to riff on whatever influence interested his whim at a given moment.

Also at this point, I speculated that moving too fast was a large part of the problem. I’ve always admired Mickey Keating’s desire to explore the capacity of his creativity by dipping into different subgenres and essentially learning by doing. The downside is viewers become guinea pigs in experiments to test what works and what doesn’t. As impressive as it may be to release four features in two years, Keating had too many irons in the fire, and he was eager to take them away from the flames so soon, they play like unfinished university projects. I wanted to see what Keating might make if he had the patience to carefully craft his next piece instead of leaving a trail of Road Runner clouds that dissipated as quickly as his output’s impact.

With four years having passed since “Psychopaths” fizzled, “Offseason” appeared to follow my line of reasoning. My hope was that taking more time would result in a focused film that doesn’t feel like it’s fumbling to invent an identity in the editing room or through on set spontaneity. “Offseason” takes a step in that right direction, although Keating still has his other foot planted in the dirt of bad habits that haunted his previous projects.

“Offseason” opens with Melora Walters delivering a monologue directly into the lens. Right away, this fourth wall break establishes a tone better suited for a stage than for cinema. Angles and editing often keep carrying this made-for-theater presentation when characters converse in alternating single shots rather than in wide takes or with a moving camera. This promotes an artificial awareness that these are actors performing for an audience instead of authentic alter egos actively engaging in a moment. That puts the film behind the proverbial 8-ball in terms of finding a feel that’s organic.

Jocelin Donahue leads a cast that includes directors Joe Swanberg, Jeremy Gardner, and Larry Fessenden in supporting roles. The inclusion of these fellow filmmakers from New York’s microbudget mumblecore scene offers one more affirmation about “Offseason” coming from isolated indie origins.

Donahue plays Marie, a woman summoned to the mysterious island of Lone Palm Beach to deal with the desecration of her mother’s grave. Swanberg’s exact romantic relationship to Marie isn’t made clear, although his stereotyping certainly is. Swanberg plays a dismissive boyfriend who predictably rolls his eyes and waves his hand in a huff when Marie recounts her dead mother’s “crazy” claims of cursed townspeople who made a deal with a sea demon.

What Marie finds when she visits the island is a whole lot of fog. Foggy forests. Foggy cemeteries. Foggy shops on a foggy street. Something “Offseason” does inarguably well is capture the misty wisps of a “Silent Hill”-type town complete with unsettling stares from side-eyeing locals. The omnipresent eeriness is fit for a Fulci film as suspense that is purely suggestive in nature drapes Lovecraft-inspired dread over every inch of the sinisterly smoky setting.

The caveat to “Offseason’s” creepiness is that the film wanders toward nowhere in particular while waiting for ambiance to settle. Scenes consist of slow pans across empty beaches, slow pans through shrouded trees, and slow pans over deserted storefronts. Other clips feature tiptoeing by flashlight or make a montage of random mannequins for no apparent reason other than they insert momentarily macabre imagery. One sequence ends on a payphone receiver dangling in a booth for several seconds. Is it important information to know that Marie left this phone off the hook? No, it’s only another long linger in a string of shots that enhance environment without advancing a plot.

While Mickey Keating shows immense improvement in his ability to make mood, his fiction still isn’t focused. Characters communicate in roundabout questions that usually go unanswered or else they employ repetitive language formations lifted right out of a David Mamet play. Here’s an example exchange from a flashback argument between Marie and her mother:

“Were you acting?”
“No.”
“You were telling me the truth?”
“You were never grateful.”
“Were you acting?”
“Never were.”
“Were you acting?”
“I’m not.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Are you acting?”
“You were telling me the truth?”
“Are you acting?”
“Ma, please stop.”
“Are you acting or are you telling me the truth?”
“Calm down. Can you be straight with me for once?”
“Are you acting or are you telling me the truth?”
“Ma, stop.”
“Please tell me.”
“Stop!”

Where does that interaction take an audience except in a circle that ends back at its beginning? “Offseason” ambles like this often. And when a movie, even one that’s a deliberately dedicated mood exercise, roams off a leash this much, viewers can only anchor to atmosphere instead of investing in any characters because that’s where the film plants its main stakes. “Offseason” excels at putting a bottle around insidious insinuations, but their hollowness tastes more like a side salad of superficial visual spooks than a juicy porterhouse of narrative-driven thrills.

It now seems like the next step in Mickey Keating’s evolution should be to direct someone else’s script instead of his own. Because “Offseason” shows Keating taking more confident command over style, yet there’s still much work to be done on constructing a concrete story.

Review Score: 55

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