Mark Reviews Movies: OFFSEASON

Offseason, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 10, 2022

Writer/director Mickey Keating's Offseason is an exercise in shallow, overly familiar atmosphere and very, very little else. Indeed, the only clearly successful element is the central performance from Jocelin Donahue, who can play believable, mounting terror like few other actors. She has deserved more work and attention for a while, and for the unearned dedication of her performance here, it feels as if the universe should probably send a more substantial role or five her way posthaste.

In the meantime, though, Donahue plays Marie Aldrich, the daughter of a famous and now dead actress, in this routine dud. Sometime following a prologue, in which the sickly mother (played by Melora Walters) goes on about nightmares and embracing them and offering a sudden scream, Marie receives a call that her mother's grave has been vandalized.

The mother's remains are located at the cemetery of the small, isolated island where she was born and raised. She never wanted to return there, either in life or in death, as we learn from a pair of unnecessary and belated flashbacks, and Marie, whose only characterization is that she was once a "problem child," is convinced someone changed her mother's will.

Anyway, she and her boyfriend George (Joe Swanberg)—although they show the chemistry of room-temperature water—travel to the island, which is about to be closed off from the public for the season. After a lot of wandering in the cemetery and the beach, as well as some unnaturally directionless driving down a road in the woods, the two end up in a car accident. Marie awakens to discover the bridge off the island has been raised, cutting her off from the mainland.

What can Marie do? Obviously, she wanders around the island, mainly in the town, which is almost soaking in fog, before visiting various buildings and getting scared by something or another. After that, there's nothing more to do than to wander some more in order to repeat the process (If one gets a sense of déjà vu from the proceedings, that person probably played a certain video game—a quiet pinnacle, if you will, of the medium's horror efforts—or has seen its movie adaptations).

None of this is particularly scary, since the fright-attempt pattern is obvious (even before Keating establishes it within the movie), or, for that matter, mysterious, since the answer to what's happening on the island is apparent (well before the filmmaker makes an extra-concerted effort to ensure it's unmistakable). Offseason is an objectively brief movie but a subjective slog of empty repetition.

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