After receiving a mysterious letter, a woman travels to a desolate island town and soon becomes trapped in a nightmare.
Writer-Director Mickey Keating delivers a movie filled with paranormal elements and a supernatural ambiance that most films of this caliber lack. Unfortunately, the other half of that equation, the human element, is sorely missing. I guess one out of two ain’t bad, or is it? Actually, it is. To make a successful spooky film that delivers chills and scares, you need to be able to relate to the characters onscreen; think of “Poltergeist,” “The Entity,” “The Changeling,” and John Carpenter’s “The Fog,” films that consisted of characters that felt authentic so when supernatural forces attacked them, you genuinely cared about them and didn’t want them to get hurt.
In “Offseason,” the story’s central protagonist, Marie (Jocelin Donahue), wanders aimlessly throughout the almost 83-minute runtime, never finding anything of substance. After receiving a mysterious letter informing her that her late mother’s grave has been vandalized, Marie returns to the isolated offshore island where her mother is buried, along with her estranged boyfriend, George (Joe Swanberg). They locate the graveyard and Marie’s mother’s vandalized grave, but the caretaker is nowhere to be found. Returning to town, the locals treat Marie and George with great contemptuousness, offering no help whatsoever. After getting back on the road that will take them back to the mainland, they discover the only bridge to and from the island is now closed until Spring.
Irritated, they head back to town, hoping to find a motel, and Marie remembers the last time she spoke with her mother and how she begged her not to return her body to the island under no circumstances. She then remembers being told that the islanders made a pact with a demon who crawled out of the water, and in exchange for keeping the island safe from storms, they could continue living freely on the island, but when they died, their souls would belong to him. Now Marie remembers why her mother was adamant she didn’t want to return. After telling George, he swerves to avoid hitting a person in the middle of the road, causing the car to smash headfirst into a tree. Later, when Marie wakes up, George is nowhere to be found, and she makes her way back into town to try and unravel the island’s mystery before she too becomes trapped, forever!
“Offseason” is filled with more than enough supernatural ambiance, but it is not enough to save the film. For someone who appears to be in a hurry to solve the island’s mystery, Marie roams the island goallessly, rambling from one eerie location to the next. She happens upon the town’s old museum and searches it dispassionately, and then continues walking down the town’s main street, an other-worldly fog enveloping her until she finds the next ominous establishment. She meets an islander who claims to know what is going on and offers to help her escape, but he is dispensed with before he can help her so why even introduce him at all? He serves no purpose other than to give false hope and then disappears. Eventually, she comes face to face with the demon itself and learns of her impending fate.
Director Mickey Keating was heavily influenced by John Carpenter and his 1980 classic, “The Fog,” Christophe Gans’ “Silent Hill,” and Robin Hardy’s cult classic, “The Wicker Man,” films that relied very heavily on atmosphere and suspense. While “Offseason” is abundant with both elements, we know very little about Marie, so her constant want and need to figure out what’s going on is understandable, but we are not given enough information about her character to genuinely care about her, other than an occasional flashback to conversations between her and her mother, exposition that conveniently fills in the story’s gaps too late in the story to warrant the surprise motif it was obviously aiming for. The film’s finale is anticlimactic and unoriginal, and when the final credits begin to roll, you feel somehow cheated that you invested time and energy in a narrative that wound up going nowhere.
Available on Blu-ray and DVD June 14th
