Offseason Review: Mickey Keating’s Recycled Show of Lovecraftian Horror

Given writer-director Mickey Keating’s tendency to direct his work toward homage and pastiche, you can probably imagine where Offseason is headed as soon as its protagonists arrive in a remote town and encounter its inhabitants, who are in thrall to some awful power. Just about the only deviation here from the expected Lovecraftian horrors is that the cosmic dread at the film’s center doesn’t haunt some New England town, but rather a Florida tourist trap. All told, though, the effect is more or less the same.

The reason for Marie (Jocelin Donahue) and George’s (Joe Swanberg) impromptu trip is already grim, as Marie learned via letter that the grave of her mother, Ava (Melora Walters), has been desecrated, the tombstone split in two. With little in the way of a preamble, Offseason favors filling in the details as it goes along. For one, Ava emphatically didn’t want to be buried back on the island where she grew up, a curious request that’s ultimately not reflected in her will.

Marie explains all this to George a ways into the film, along with her suspicion that someone changed the will and her mother’s story about an island curse. In doing so, she clarifies the strange scene that opens Offseason, where Ava is talking about her fears but we have no context for who she is or whose POV we’re meant to share as she talks into the camera.

Coupled with cryptic whispers on the soundtrack, Offseason tries to capture one’s unmoored sense of entering a strange place. Not only do Marie and George arrive at their destination quickly, but they can’t seem to leave despite driving on a straight road with no wrong turns to take. When they back the car up, the woods are inexplicably behind them.

Keating manages some gorgeously haunting shots, but the disorienting atmosphere goes nowhere new. That’s because every scare is sprung from familiar horror settings subsumed by fog, from a graveyard to deserted storefronts. At a bar, the locals go silent as they turn to gawk at the outsiders, and one house seems safe only for Marie to discover something terrible in the attic. Worse, the occult underpinnings of the town’s tourist trade are laid out in full, destroying whatever sense of unknowable dread the film wrings from its craft and location.

There’s precisely one inventive scene, where Marie breaks into a drawbridge booth. She fast-forwards through an old VHS training video to learn the controls, and the odd clunkiness of this absurd interlude gives the film its one and only burst of singular eccentricity.

Otherwise, Offseason mostly consists of characters wandering through fog-laden settings, cowering from old people with evil-looking eyeballs, and a lot of reference points to such films as Messiah of Evil. Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.