SXSW ’21 REVIEW

SXSW 2021: Dead in the Water ‘OFFSEASON’ A Bloated, Shambling Corpse of a Seaside Haunter

Name: SXSW 2021: Dead in the Water ‘OFFSEASON’ A Bloated, Shambling Corpse of a Seaside Haunter
Item: Offseason
Rating: 68
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · March 17, 2021

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A featherlight folk horror from Mickey Keating (Carnage Park), Offseason fails to conjure much of a reason for its existence, plundering the corpses of similar seaside folklore horror stories but bringing zero new ideas or visual intrigue to the table. At only 83 minutes, the barebones haunted town horror tale still majorly drags, a problem born from its dramatically inert narrative and exacerbated by numerous pacing problems. There are a couple (as in exactly two) memorable visual tableaus that shock the viewer out of a state of near-total apathy but it’s far too little too late to salvage Keating’s creation from sinking to the depths of horror movie irrelevancy.

Little more than a wild goose chase through a haunted isle plopped atop some ramshackle Lovecraftian mythos, Offseason begins when Marie (Jocelin Donahue, miscast and ultimately inert in the role) receives a letter from the caretaker where her mother Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters), a silver screen star who escaped the island and swore never to return, is buried. Her grave has been desecrated and Marie must come immediately to help sort the details. As to why those details would ever involve anything more than fixing the grave is not mentioned, just as no detail herein is too big to just gloss over and move past.

Accompanied by George (Joe Swanberg), a character with whom Marie shares shaky backstory and zero chemistry, the estranged daughter goes to the far-flung island, which is of course set to close off its only bridge to the outside world in a matter of hours. From there, Marie and George dash about, see some ghostly figures, learn tidbits about the island’s dark union with ancestral forces, and do almost nothing else. Which is disappointing because it actually all begins on a rather creepy and promising note, with Walters’ wooing us with a harrowing direct-to-camera warning, handsomely mounted and ominous fog-covered vistas, and a chilling score that really sets the tone. A shame that it has nowhere to go from there.

The key issue with Offseason is that almost none of the individual elements work. The scares are either ineffective or non-existent; the mystery is flat, uninvolving, and quickly solved by anyone paying a modicum of attention; the performances are tepid and unconvincing; and the writing and direction from Keating does very little to tie everything together and invest audiences in his story. Instead, by the end of the first act, you have a very good idea where everything is going and it’s like a freighter on autopilot from there on out, all the way to the shrugging shipwreck of an ending.

It doesn’t help matters that just this year, HBO’s The Third Day – about a family who go to an far-flung island where an insular community lives away from the prying eye of larger society and worship a mythic pagan deity – pretty much already did everything that Offseason is attempting but in a manner that was objectively better in almost every sense. It’s not my intention to pile on but, seriously, just watch that series instead. You’ll be glad you did.

And this remains the hurdle that Offseason cannot clear: there are just too many versions of this story, this myth, this movie that already exist and do so much more gracefully and effectively. A watered down rehash is not always necessarily bad, and can smuggle treasures in their own right (think of the not-so-subtle difference between 2006 Wicker Man and 1973 Wicker Man), but Keating fails to make this story his own and the resulting film feels joyless and pale because of it.

CONCLUSION: ‘Offseason’ is a skeletal whisper of an idea (daughter of cult-esque escapee reckons with family legacy on a haunted island) that just never finds its groove or flower as a horror story. The fact that it feels long at less than 90 minutes speaks to how thematically and narratively barren the latest from Mickey Keating ultimately is. Big disappointment.