No one expects Mickey Keating‘s modus operandi to evolve at this point in his career. He makes short, slight, and derivative horror flicks on the cheap that crib mercilessly from their betters because he has nothing original to say. No style, less substance, bad pacing: that’s the Keating way. So it went with “Darling,” “Carnage Park,” and “Psychopaths,” and so, one would predict, it goes with “Offseason,” his latest. As much as this seaside folk horror tale suffers from Keating’s usual foibles, like too many inter-titles and an inert script, there’s nonetheless something chilling about its premise. A daughter reckons with her family legacy and discovers a secret, fatal truth about herself in the process. Have renditions of this story been told countless times before? No doubt about that, but that’s because the story gets at something mythic and essential each time it’s told.
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So, what’s the harm in another retelling, especially when this one takes place on a haunted island? After all, variations on a theme are just about the only thing Keating excels at cinematically. And Keating gets off to a solid start in “Offseason” — after the tacky opening credits, anyway — with folktale’s most cautionary of beginnings: a mother’s warning. Shot in close-up, Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters), troubled movie star, offers advice from her deathbed: that you can’t run away from nightmares but must instead accept them as if they were family or an old friend. Then, with a piercing scream, a thunderclap, and a whisper, “what’s that mean, an old friend?” Keating cuts to the title card. That sounds less like a warning than a plea to someone to accept their fate. Whose destiny has been spun, measured, and cut without their knowing?
Enter Marie (independent scream starlet Jocelin Donahue), Ava’s daughter, who receives a letter from the caretaker on a remote island community about her mother’s desecrated grave. The issue requires immediate action, so Marie drives out to the desolate vacation spot from NYC with her friend George (mumblecore legend Joe Swanburg) to figure out repairs. Of course, once they arrive, the island is about to close for the season until spring, and the only bridge to the mainland goes up within hours. No sign of the caretaker, either. Locals aren’t helpful for his whereabouts and even mock Marie and George’s situation. Once they hit the road again, Marie confides to George the truth: her mother never wanted to be buried here, and she suspects someone changed Ava’s will to make it happen.
What’s more, Marie also suspects a trap, and it has something to do with a local folktale about a pact old-time sailors once made with a man from the sea. As the road disappears in front of them and their car crashes into the thicket, Marie’s fears prove correct. What follows is a flat, flimsy mystery with few twists, less turns, and no sense of suspense’s inherent rhythms of tension and release. Possessed townspeople, a brief reunion with a lost relative, and flashbacks to Marie and Ava’s estranged relationship offer little in terms of intrigue. As Marie pieces together the island’s dark union with a mythical deity, Keating attempts to bring things to a Lovecraftian crescendo. Instead, the film sputters to a predictable denouement, with Marie’s fate sealed as a permanent member of the island’s accursed community.
To Keating’s credit, “Offseason” isn’t all poor stylistic choices and a thinly outlined script. Keating conjures a moody tone from the set-up — best described as haunted exotic — with a gray, aquatic color palette, some gravestones, and lots and lots of fog. Audio cues also give the far-flung summer haven a creepy sense of place: as waves crash, thunder curdles, and gulls squawk, Marie’s doomed destination comes alive. The problem is, after said set-up, Keating hits his limit with mise-en-scene. He stages scenes awkwardly as the narrative flounders around and hardly expands upon the established spooky signifiers. A handful of locations in the film’s opening act, like when Marie searches for George on the beach as a storm rolls in, show that Keating knows how to compose a shot. These moments are rare, though, and Keating never capitalizes on his coastal location as he should.
The same goes for the film’s genre tropes. “Offseason” begins just like one of no-budget horror’s milestones, George A. Romero‘s “Night Of The Living Dead,” does: a pair goes to visit a grave and falls into the clutches of terror soon after. However, whereas Romero masterfully separates Barbra and Johnny and then sends Barbra off to a close-quartered farmhouse cramped with other characters, Keating does the opposite. Marie and George aren’t siblings, but they are also not very cordial, made worse by Donahue and Swanberg’s lack of onscreen chemistry. And once Keating splits the pair post-car crash, Marie merely wanders around the ghost town until she runs into a fisherman (Jeremy Gardner) only there to explain what’s going on before he dies. There’s no reason to expect Keating to plumb racial tensions or probe civilization’s inherent fragility like Romero does in his 1968 classic. Still, Romero is the criterion of Keating’s filmmaking style, and this film further proves that Keating lacks the chops to achieve that standard.
“Offseason” is another shoddy offering from Mickey Keating, but that doesn’t dilute Marie’s fate of its tragic framing. While the film only glances at its themes of insular communities and family secrets, or even its Lovecraftian take on Persephone’s mythical abduction, it’s a terrifying premise to realize, far too late, that an unseen force grips you in its deceitful embrace. In the case of Marie, the sinister deity that coerces her from the depths beyond proves more powerful than law, family, and other markers of societal safety. This barebones genre take on Greek mythology’s net of necessity would have a little more nuance in another director’s hands. In Keating’s case, however, it’s another example that no matter how timeless a tale may be, it needs a shrewd storyteller to make an impact. [C-]