Director/Screenplay – Mickey Keating, Producers – Maurice Fadida & Eric B. Fleischman, Photography – Mac Fisken, Music – Shayfer James, Visual Effects – Neon Robotic (Supervisor – Nathan Weiner), Special Effects Supervisor – Justin Moeller, Makeup & Creature Effects – Jim Ojala, Production Design – Sabrena Allen-Biron. Production Company – Defiant Studios.
Cast
Jocelin Donahue (Marie Aldrich), Joe Swanberg (George Darrow), Melora Walters (Ava Aldrich), Jeremy Gardner (The Fisherman), Richard Brake (Bridge Man), April Linscott (Miss Emily)
Plot
After receiving a letter informing her that her mother’s grave has been desecrated, Marie Aldrich travels from New York City to the small town of Lone Palm Beach. Marie and her ex George Darrow arrive just as the bridge off the island is about to be closed for the winter season. They head to the grave but soon become separated. Marie finds the locals threatening. She remembers her mother’s dying wishes not to be taken back to Lone Palm and stories about how the locals had made a pact with a sea creature.
Mickey Keating is a director who gained a reasonable buzz in the mid-2010s. Keating first appeared with Ritual (2013) and Pod (2015) and started to gain attention with Darling (2015), going on to make the likes of Carnage Park (2016) and Psychopaths (2017).
After discovering Darling, I thought Mickey Keating had a good deal of promise, although after having made my way through most of the rest of his filmography, it becomes apparent that he can be very hit and miss. I was not sure which way that Off Season would go but thankfully it is on the positive side. The town where someone suddenly finds they cannot leave is a familiar trope in genre cinema – see Sinister Small Towns – while the town where the locals seem to exist in an eerie twilight zone between dead and living reminds of works such as Messiah of Evil (1973) and The Locals (2003).
You are immediately taken by the superb mood that Mickey Keating generates. The scenes with Jocelin Donahue wandering through the cemetery with half-seen figures appearing out of the woods achieve something really quite haunted. The beach scenes come with a sense of desolate emptiness where the sands, sky and sea seem to stretch forever and fade into the same uniform blue-grey. A scene mid-film with Jocelin Donahue wandering through the deserted town covered in mist with the indistinct shapes of building coming out of the fog is an incredibly eerie piece of mood.
Jocelin Donahue in an eerily haunted town
There are assorted scenes at a local bar, including an over-friendly fisherman played by Jeremy Gardner (a fine director/writer in his own right with standout films like The Battery (2012) and After Midnight (2019) in which he also plays the lead). It is a film where Mickey Keating does a superlative job in creating a dream-like mood that slowly segues over into nightmare.
The cryptic hints about the locals having conducted a deal with a fish monster from the sea – something you feel that the film needed more explanation than it gets – has strong overtones of the H.P. Lovecraft short story The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1935), which has been filmed as Dagon (2001) and H.P. Lovecraft’s The Deep Ones (2020). The later scenes where Jocelin Donahue returns to the bar to see the patrons frozen and the appearance of ghostly figures with white eyes creates a distinct overtones of something out of Carnival of Souls (1962).
