A woman finds herself trapped on the sinister island where her mother was
buried against her wishes.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mickey Keating
Starring: Jocelin Donahue, Melora Walters, Richard Brake, Joe
Swanberg, Jeremy Gardner
Someone once famously said that all you need to make a good horror
movie is an out of season tourist trap and a fog machine. That's the
quote, right? Well, it should be. A slew of recent British horror movies
have employed off-season seaside resorts as their setting, mining the
unique empty eeriness of such locales. Now with writer/director
Mickey Keating's Offseason, we're seeing this idea employed to great effect across the
Atlantic.
The setting for Keating's film is a winner from the off, an island off
the East Coast that's teeming with holidaymakers every summer but shuts
down for the rest of the year as the Atlantic Ocean dishes out a severe
beating, making it close to uninhabitable.
It's on the first day of the off-season that our story begins, with
Marie (Jocelin Donahue) travelling to the island having received
a letter from the caretaker of the cemetery that houses the grave of her
mother, Ava (Melora Walters), a once popular actress who went
crazy before her death. It seems the grave has been desecrated, and
apparently there's no way to contact the cemetery apart from driving out
there.
After ignoring the warning of the creepy guy (Richard Brake) who
controls the bascule bridge that grants access to the island, Marie
finds the cemetery deserted with no sign of the caretaker. Her mother's
grave has indeed been tampered with, its tombstone smashed in two.
Enquiries among the local populace, most of whom are gathered in a local
tavern straight out of An American Werewolf in London, lead to a dead end, and so Marie and her driving companion George
(who may be her husband? I didn't quite pick up on this exact dynamic)
decide to leave the island. But wouldn't you know, they find it
impossible to do so, as the previously straight road leads to a literal
dead end. It seems something doesn't want Marie to leave the
island.
Keating is known for making movies that proudly wear their influences
on their sleeves. His 2015 psychological thriller
Darling riffs on Polanski's "Apartment trilogy", while his
2016 film Carnage Park is a nod to Peter Watkins'
Punishment Park. With Offseason, the influences are numerous. Most obvious seems to be Willard Huyck
and Gloria Katz' cult masterpiece Messiah of Evil, which similarly saw its heroine travel to a remote coastal town to
investigate an incident involving a parent. Like
The Wicker Man, we quickly get the sense that Marie has been lured to the island for
some nefarious purpose. The film's Lovecraftian elements are heavily
reminiscent of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, while with their milky pupils, the possessed islanders are straight
out of Lucio Fulci's "Gates of Hell" trilogy. With the entire island
shrouded in a thick shawl of mist, it's impossible not to think of
Carpenter's The Fog, and there's a moment of body-horror straight out of
The Thing. And it all wraps up with a tip of the hat to Jacques Tourneur.
Keating takes all these influences and homages and mixes them into a
creamy chowder with a flavour of its own. Offseason stands
out from its horror contemporaries with its resolute focus on sustaining
mood and atmosphere. Jump scares are entirely absent, and any plot is
kept to a minimum, quickly dispensed by a brief speech from Marie that
gives us just enough background to figure out what she may be dealing
with here. This is old school horror, with a fog machine working
overtime, mist creeping around tombstones and hanging vines as
telephones ring tauntingly in the distance. Like Carpenter, Keating
makes great use of the empty space of his widescreen frame, keeping us
constantly on edge looking for figures in the shadows and mist.
Man, I'm a sucker for this stuff. When it comes to horror, I couldn't
care less about plot, which is why so many mainstream American horror
movies bore me to tears. Just drop your protagonist into a creepy
netherworld and terrorise them with as many cinematic tools as you can
muster, and I'm a happy horror hound. Keating does just that, and to
great effect, trapping us in a hell of his creation along with his
terrified but resolute heroine. If that's your cup of tea, you'll be
drawn to the eerie delights of Keating's terrifying tourist trap.
