One thing is for certain: Director Mickey Keating and cinematographer Mac Fisken have crafted an off-kilter atmosphere in Offseason, a psychological thriller that may or may not become a supernatural one by the end. Another thing, just for posterity’s sake, can be stated, as well: Keating, who also wrote the screenplay, did right by the ultimately pretty thin material here in casting Jocelin Donahue as the protagonist, a woman who has arrived in the small islander town where she was raised to investigate some of the strange circumstances surrounding her mother’s death. Atmosphere, though, gets one only so far with a movie, even one that firmly belongs in the horror category, and unfortunately it doesn’t get us very far with this one.
The problem settles around the time the film enters what one supposes is meant to be its climax, where all is revealed and the questions are answered. Keating’s screenplay has set up a mystery in which it expects the audience to be engaged — or hopes it is. Donahue’s performance as Marie Aldrich, the daughter of a once-renowned actress, gets us part of the way toward genuine engagement with the mystery that develops for this character. Basically, years after a falling-out with her mother (Melora Walters), Marie has arrived upon receiving word that mom’s gravesite has been vandalized. The sickly woman, who was difficult and confrontational at the best of times, never wanted to return to this place, so the other question for Marie is why she had been buried here at all.
Along for the ride is George (Joe Swanberg), Marie’s boyfriend, who is mostly here to disappear for a long stretch of the movie’s brief runtime. Since Donahue is quite good separately from this central relationship, it’s rather disconcerting to see such a disengaged performance as the one given by Swanberg here, especially in scenes between the two, brought up short by a lack of even the remotest chemistry. George is a device for Keating, especially in that accursed climax, and until then, we must endure an hour of subjective misdirection and literal meandering (the couple, followed by only Marie, wander around enough of the island town that the film acts as a virtual tour of the location where these scenes were shot), and the actor seems both to recognize and begrudgingly accept that.
A routine, as sleepy as the pace of this waking nightmare, develops, with Marie encounters someone in the town, squabbles with each of them about her mother’s wishes and the will she drew up before death, and discovers that not all is right with this enclosed world. Worst of all, the gatekeeper (Richard Brake) has closed the island off from the outside world, so there really is no chance for escape. That’s when things turn supernatural and just plain weird.
This is all intriguing in a sort of detached way. We can appreciate the atmosphere built by Keating, but it seems to be at the service of a big nothingburger of a movie. Every payoff is an anticlimax – from the truth about what has happened to the people in this town to the reason why Marie’s mother found her way back to this place in death. There is a lot of promise to be had with this story and this character, but Offseason wastes it with a shallow and familiar story of spooky things looming from a fog.
Photo courtesy of RLJE Films
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