"Offseason" a mixed bag of strong atmosphere and wheel-spinning story

Offseason (2022)

As much as filmmaker Mickey Keating bleeds his retro influences on his sleeve, he never makes the same movie twice. Succeeding his Polanski-inspired mood piece (2016’s “Darling”) and his ‘70s-style crime thriller (2016’s “Carnage Park”) is “Offseason,” a beach-town ghost story. While it’s richly atmospheric and tantalizing for a long time, this spooky little nightmare becomes less compelling as it draws closer to solving its own mystery.

Marie (Jocelin Donahue) has recently lost her mother, movie star Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters). When she receives an urgent letter that her mother’s grave has been vandalized, Marie rushes to the island town of Lone Palm Beach where Mom was buried. (What a person can actually do once they get to the vandalized site isn’t entirely clear, but go with it.) Arriving on the island with partner George (Joe Swanberg), everything is a harbinger of doom. The Bridge Man (played by a reliably menacing Richard Brake) tells them the town is closed until spring. The cemetery caretaker is nowhere to be found. The islanders at a local bar are less than welcoming, and Marie begins seeing ghostly people pop up in clusters. With the bridge to the mainland already raised, Marie and George are stranded, and things can only get worse.

“Offseason” is thick with atmosphere and dread from the very beginning. Keating opens with Super 8 footage of the dreamy summer vacation spot cued to the magical orchestrations of “Aquarium” from Camille Saint-Saëns’ “The Carnival of the Animals” suite before smash-cutting to the desolate ghost town it becomes during the winter offseason. In the same dreary mood, Melora Walters, as Marie’s mother, gives an affecting monologue as if she’s breaking the fourth wall. How she speaks of her inescapable nightmares quickly turns chilling as it’s clear she’s mentally unwell, until letting out a blood-curdling scream. 

As a chapter-divided narrative, “Offseason” is pretty thin and spins its wheels most of the time. The supernatural/deal-with-the-Devil mythology is too half-baked that it comes across as silly rather than frightening or disturbing. A radiant, relatable talent since Ti West’s “The House of the Devil,” Jocelin Donahue does, however, carry the film on her natural presence, perhaps more so than the writing of Marie. We learn next to nothing about this woman, nor do we get an actual sense of her relationship with George (a functional Joe Swanberg), but more attention is eventually paid to the stormy relationship between her and her mother, at least gradually in flashbacks. 

If anything, writer-director Keating furthers his strong command of style and sense of place. Composer Shayfer James’ string-heavy score also does some heavy lifting, and the use of The Vogues’ “Turn Around, Look at Me” is creepily inspired in its foreboding. Production design is solid, making this fog-shrouded coastal town feel real and whole as a shell of its formerly charming self (and comparisons could be made to the first “Silent Hill” movie adaptation). Keating also occasionally pivots with a horror-movie trope, like characters actually driving around a tree in the road instead of getting out to move it. Then, at other times, he plays right into a trope, like a door locking when the story beat calls for it, only to unlock itself at the right time. Anchored by its lead performance and technical merits, “Offseason” envelops the viewer in the off-kilter goings-on for as long as it can. It just doesn’t add up to more than a genre exercise with fog machines.

Grade: C +

RLJE Films and Shudder are releasing “Offseason” (83 min.) in select theaters and on VOD and digital on March 11, 2022.