The Fog of Forgettable Horror
Mickey Keating’s Offseason opens like the ghost of a better movie—fog, saltwater, a small-town graveyard desecration, and a cryptic letter that screams, “Don’t come here.” Naturally, our protagonist comes anyway. It’s the kind of horror setup that promises dread but delivers something closer to a moody Airbnb stay gone wrong. You can almost smell the mildew of missed opportunities wafting from the screen.
Jocelin Donahue plays Marie Aldrich, a woman whose mother’s grave has been vandalized. That’s enough to lure her to an isolated island that apparently doesn’t know what customer service or ferry schedules are. Once there, she finds the roads empty, the people creepily polite, and the air thick with something—though it’s not tension, it’s boredom.
Jocelin Donahue vs. The Island of Beige Terror
Donahue, a talented actress capable of elevating a wet nap to pathos, does her damnedest here. She delivers every gasp, every frightened glance, and every whispered “what’s happening?” like she’s auditioning for a remake of The Wicker Mandirected by Wes Anderson—lots of atmosphere, zero threat.
The supporting cast, including Joe Swanberg and Richard Brake, seem to have wandered in from different movies. Swanberg’s George Darrow exudes the kind of aimless concern usually reserved for people stuck in a haunted IKEA. Richard Brake, a man whose face was seemingly carved by Satan’s cutlery, has the most potential. He looks like he bathes in nightmares, but here, he’s criminally underused—standing around like a gothic Walmart greeter.
Aesthetics Without Teeth
Keating’s direction wants to channel Lovecraftian despair—endless ocean, isolation, the breakdown of sanity—but it ends up feeling like a perfume ad directed by a melancholic fisherman. Every frame is dripping with style: fog, neon lights, shadowy figures. But beneath that style, there’s no bite. It’s a movie that whispers instead of screams, then forgets why it opened its mouth.
You keep waiting for the horror to arrive—for something to crawl out of the mist, or for Marie to uncover a secret that justifies the somber tone. But Offseason never builds; it meanders. It’s all setup and no payoff, like someone stretched out a five-minute Twilight Zone idea into a 90-minute existential nap.
The Curse of the Monologue
At one point, Melora Walters shows up to deliver cryptic lines about fate, legacy, and the sea reclaiming its own. You can feel the movie wanting to be deep—like it’s trying to drown you in metaphors. But the dialogue is so self-serious it becomes comedic. Characters talk like fortune cookies written by Edgar Allan Poe after a Xanax binge.
Even the locals, played by character actors like Larry Fessenden and Jeremy Gardner, feel wasted. These are people who can do “weird” in their sleep, but here they’re reduced to blank-eyed exposition machines. It’s like watching a haunted tourism board meeting.
Horror Without Hunger
Good horror eats its audience alive. It gnaws at you. Offseason, on the other hand, seems content to nibble politely. It has the bones of something special—a sense of place, a potentially interesting mythos—but it’s too cautious. It tiptoes around terror, never embracing the madness it flirts with.
The island should be oppressive, suffocating—a living entity pulling Marie down into its rotten core. Instead, it feels like an underpopulated film set where everyone forgot to turn the fog machine off. You don’t feel trapped; you feel mildly inconvenienced.
When the Credits Roll, You’re Still Waiting
By the time the movie drifts toward its watery finale, you realize you’ve been waiting for something—anything—to happen. It’s the cinematic equivalent of being stuck in line at the DMV during a power outage.
Keating wants to evoke The Fog or Silent Hill—stories where place and atmosphere are the monster—but he misses the essential ingredient: menace. The result is horror without hunger, style without sweat. You could watch this movie twice and still not be sure what it’s about.
The Bukowski of Boredom
If Charles Bukowski reviewed this, he’d probably say something like, “It’s like watching a drunk priest try to describe hell, but all he remembers is the wallpaper.” There’s an honesty in badness when it comes from risk-taking. But Offseasonisn’t even bad enough to be interesting—it’s safe, somber, and satisfied with its own melancholy.
It’s a film that mistakes silence for suspense and repetition for rhythm. Every scene feels like a déjà vu of the last. The ocean roars. Someone stares. The camera lingers. Repeat until numbness sets in.
A Vacation You’ll Regret Booking
There’s a version of Offseason that could’ve been great—a surreal, feverish nightmare about grief and inevitability. Instead, we get a mopey mood piece that treats horror like a bad inheritance.
By the time the end credits roll, you won’t be frightened; you’ll be Googling ferry schedules to escape this cinematic purgatory. It’s not that the film fails spectacularly—it’s that it fails politely.
If Offseason were a hotel, it’d be the kind that offers “continental despair” for breakfast and no refunds for early checkout.
Final Verdict
Offseason is a ghost story that forgot its ghost. It’s a horror film afraid of horror—a 90-minute sigh wrapped in fog and filtered through an Instagram lens. Jocelin Donahue deserves better. Richard Brake deserves blood. We, the audience, deserve something to remember.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
A beautiful, brooding, boring mess—proof that atmosphere alone can’t save a story that’s dead on arrival.
