Written and directed by Mickey Keating
Starring Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Melora Walters and Jeremy Gardner
Runtime: 1 hour, 23 minutes
Not rated
In Theaters, Digital, and On Demand March 11

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The premise of Mickey Keating's new film Offseason–a couple visit the small, secluded hometown of a deceased loved one and everything with the locals isn't exactly what it seems–is old news and the movie looks an awful lot like The Fog and any number of other things that have also cribbed from The Fog (I thought of the Silent Hill video games a few times). I don't really care. Judging horror on its aesthetic originality doesn't get you too far. The best stuff iterates on old horror, knowing an audience will accept a passed-down framework if the details are executed well. Offseason's details are executed beautifully.

I've already summarized as much of the plot as you'd need to know. The novelty of Offseason's small, secluded town is its location just off the mainland. Marie (Jocelin Donahue) and George (Joe Swanberg) visit after receiving a letter that Marie's mother's grave has been disturbed. Unfortunately, they arrive on the last day the island town is open to outsiders-- they'll have a day to deduce what happened and get out before the bridge connecting the town to civilization goes up for the rest of the season.

Again, it's the details that make a story like this work. Offseason presents plenty of them without shifting everything to explain or "solve" anything. It's a relief that they keep the story interesting without being distracting. Through little asides in dialogue, we learn Marie and George hadn't seen each other in a while before the trip and that they'd like to rekindle whatever they had when it's done. Marie's mother Ava (Melora Walters) was a famous actor, Marie her publicly known "problem child." That doesn't mean we see Marie gaze sweatily at a line of cocaine and it doesn't mean we have to sit through flashbacks where Ava scolds her for past digressions. It means Marie is a human being. It means the characters in Offseason weren't born five minutes before the film's plot began. In some ways, this extends to details most movies would consider necessary. When Marie finally confronts the force at the center of the island's darkness, she yells at it to just tell her what it is, to define itself. "It doesn't matter who I am," it says. He may be, according to another character's story, a demon that emerged from the sea to offer prosperity to the suffering island residents, but we don't quite know what that means as far as his powers, intentions or limits are concerned. As with the best folk horror, it's more important we know what the entity's followers believe it can do.

The "off-season" element of Offseason is its greatest asset. In a windy, rainy, evacuated space, you feel uneasy whenever a shape appears in the fog or a noise cracks out down the beach. When one character finds an abandoned building, the requisite somehow-on radio plays the requisite old-timey Shining bar music. This is well-worn stuff. This is nobody's idea of groundbreaking. That doesn't mean it isn't creepy. Folk horror usually gets a few tropes that I find irresistible, and those are rendered fresh here purely by the skill of those involved in bringing them to Offseason. Any tense story about people leaving their society for a closed-off island with tightly-knit locals is going to have to explain how that island keeps its true nature hidden, and that usually means a couple people sympathetic to the island's nature living in the outside world, among all of us fallen souls, running errands and interference for the folks who benefit enough from the "folk horror" to not see it as horror at all. Richard Brake, who you've seen in a dozen films, plays that role incredibly here. It isn't even a spoiler to say he's a seemingly-normal guy with some deeper connections to the Pagan world-- he's presented from the beginning as a fervent, bitter figure straddling the normal and the horrific. You the viewer aren't stupid enough to think the town is truly placid, so why would Mickey Keating and Richard Brake treat you like you don't recognize that the unhinged creep is unhinged. They lean into it and Brake is allowed to fully embody a character without pulling any punches.

As Offseason opens, Melora Walters is framed in a long, uncut close shot. She's teary and in a hospital bed, addressing the camera directly about her readiness for death and her past spent escaping an unnamed group of people who have followed her every move. At the end of her monologue, she screams so harshly I flinched. That's the movie. There's an unsettling if traditional story, told perfectly and in an untraditional way, and it gets to you even if you spend the entire scene pretty sure you're in for something scary.