I saw Offseason listed on a particular website's year-end roundup of 2022's best horror. I think it was the AV Club but I'm not certain. Anyway, the writer described it as feeling like old-time radio, and I didn't have any other misty New England coastal films lined up for the month of October, so I slotted it in.
The film starts on a bad note--pretty much literally. The music is very in-your-face and melodramatic. I think a quieter, moodier score would have better accentuated the atmosphere. Our main characters are driving into a small island town because the heroine has gotten word that her mother's gravesite was desecrated. As the film goes on you find out that her mother was a film star who escaped the town and gave her daughter strict orders not to bury her there, under any circumstances, but a mysterious change in the will forced our heroine's hand.
Intriguing premise and some good ideas, but you have to stick with it to get anywhere worthwhile. The main couple is obnoxious right off the bat, passive-aggressively sniping at each other in the car. You'd like there to be some kind of sympathetic back story that gives depth to their strained marriage, but you don't get it. After a few moments in the graveyard that aim for eerie but come across as simply overblown (the crisp digital cinematography doesn't help--the scenes are overlit in a way that works against the overcast, sea salt melancholy), you get the obligatory "strangers in a small town" scene where they step into a local pub and the cheerfully noisome locals immediately go DEAD SILENT as all heads turn to leer at the newcomers. A cliched moment like that really has to be handled with delicacy to avoid seeming like parody, and in Offseason it's one of many moments when I wasn't sure if I was meant to be amused or unsettled.
Our heroine's flashbacks to her mother's final days give a bit of weight to her otherwise insubstantial character, and the payoff of the last few minutes is enough to make me forgive the movie's lack of originality. I can't help but think there was a much more interesting angle for the writer/director to take on the story, though, rather than this cobbled-together Lovecraftian pastiche that brings nothing new to the mythos.
The film starts on a bad note--pretty much literally. The music is very in-your-face and melodramatic. I think a quieter, moodier score would have better accentuated the atmosphere. Our main characters are driving into a small island town because the heroine has gotten word that her mother's gravesite was desecrated. As the film goes on you find out that her mother was a film star who escaped the town and gave her daughter strict orders not to bury her there, under any circumstances, but a mysterious change in the will forced our heroine's hand.
Intriguing premise and some good ideas, but you have to stick with it to get anywhere worthwhile. The main couple is obnoxious right off the bat, passive-aggressively sniping at each other in the car. You'd like there to be some kind of sympathetic back story that gives depth to their strained marriage, but you don't get it. After a few moments in the graveyard that aim for eerie but come across as simply overblown (the crisp digital cinematography doesn't help--the scenes are overlit in a way that works against the overcast, sea salt melancholy), you get the obligatory "strangers in a small town" scene where they step into a local pub and the cheerfully noisome locals immediately go DEAD SILENT as all heads turn to leer at the newcomers. A cliched moment like that really has to be handled with delicacy to avoid seeming like parody, and in Offseason it's one of many moments when I wasn't sure if I was meant to be amused or unsettled.
Our heroine's flashbacks to her mother's final days give a bit of weight to her otherwise insubstantial character, and the payoff of the last few minutes is enough to make me forgive the movie's lack of originality. I can't help but think there was a much more interesting angle for the writer/director to take on the story, though, rather than this cobbled-together Lovecraftian pastiche that brings nothing new to the mythos.