Writer-director Mickey Keating’s confident and chilling horror feature Offseason ($28.96 Blu-ray, $27.97 DVD, and streaming on Shudder) is set in a community called Lone Palm Beach. Lone Palm Beach is an isolated island off the coast of the Eastern United States, accessible by bridge, that jolts to life only during high tourist season. Its few year-round residents — all of them old-timers, it seems — cling to bygone traditions, like cavorting in a time-warped piano bar. If they look a little too long in the tooth, a little too white in the eyes, a little dead inside, it’s the price they pay for everlasting comfort in a paradise of their making.
If this description of Lone Palm Beach hits a little too close to home, surely the likeness to an actual island of geriatric privilege just off our coast is purely coincidental. Islanders-as-energy-vampires sucking the life from visitors in exchange for immortality can happen anywhere. Though I shudder to think what goes on in those cloistered bowels of the Everglades Club after-hours and offseason; necromancy probably isn’t the half of it.
Marie Aldrich (Jocelin Donahue), the movie’s fretful and cautious protagonist, is soon to find out. She has received a letter from the island’s cemetery caretaker that the grave of her mother, Hollywood actress Ava Aldrich (the eternally underrated Melora Walters in another small but unnerving performance), has been vandalized; she is to alight to Lone Palm Beach immediately.
It so happens that Marie and her husband George (Joe Swanberg) arrive at the island, amid an ominous thunderstorm, on the final night of its tourist season. Within hours of their arrival, the bridge will go up for the lengthy offseason. They’d better hurry. And yet the mysterious caretaker is nowhere to be found, and the locals, leering and leery, speak only in cryptic puzzles and glitchy sentence fragments.
There’s a Jordan Peele quality to the us-versus-them conflict at the core of Offseason, though Keating’s m.o. is closer to that of a lean-and-mean genre picture than Peele’s calculated sociopolitical commentary. As a twist on the durable survivor-girl horror trope, it’s more primal than it is thematically transcendent — more Outer Limits than Twilight Zone — and that’s not a criticism. Without being too subversive, the writer-director has naughty fun with the names of his fictional island’s institutions, like the double entendre of the Sand Trap, a foreboding lounge teeming with maniacally laughing denizens.
But the writing and characterizations are not what carry this fat-free and fast-moving thriller toward its sinister epilogue; Marie is at best a thinly imagined protagonist, George even less so. It’s the oppressive atmosphere that makes Offseason so compulsively watchable.
Keating films with long takes, wide angles and an art-house director’s patience, finding the menace in his widescreen visions of oblivion. Words are often unnecessary. Marie is alone for most of the action, which plays out during nightfall. Her twilit journey through an abandoned island history museum is presented as a crepuscular carnival of inert horrors.
It’s all aided by a first-rate sound design, in which the disquieting score from Shayfer Jones and the sound design of Shawn Duffy blur into a miasma of unease: quivering strings, intestinal rumbles, bowel-churning drums, a creaking gate, a ticking stopwatch, a distant alarm bell, a bit of David Lynchian backwards speech.
Offseason is far from a slasher — it’s virtually bloodless, and does not rely on easy jump scares — but it is certainly bloodcurdling in its relentless audiovisual accumulation of dread. I don’t know that it ultimately says anything profound about the undead nature of a reclusive gentry clutching the embers of a time long past, but with such tactile terrors at its disposal, the surface itself is frightening enough.