Old School creepy goes a long way in my book. I’m always in the mood for an immersive plunge into nightmare waters.
Off Season is Old School creepy, a diabolical downward spiral with definite shades of Carnival of Souls and Dead and Buried tellingly layered into a Lovecraftian landscape.
Writer-director Mickey Keating, a former Blumhouse intern, has manifested another one of those damned tourist trap towns that visitors find impossible to leave behind.
Marie (Jocelin Donahue) is the daughter of reclusive actress Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters), who recently passed away and was laid to rest on the small coastal island where she grew up.
Funny thing, before she died, Ava told her daughter specifically to not allow her body to be buried there.
Funnier thing: Two lawyers she’s never met inform Marie that her mother changed her will, and that she wanted to be buried on the island.
Shortly thereafter, Marie receives a mysterious letter from the caretaker of the cemetery instructing her to come at once to address the recent vandalism of Ava’s grave.
Once she and her whiny husband George (Joe Swanberg) arrive on the island, the trap springs shut and the real nightmare can begin. Marie discovers the community is a hotbed of pagan idolatry and that many years before the villagers made a deal with “a man who came from the sea.”
Off Season comes foggily shrouded in a fatalistic sense of inevitability that dwarfs our petty terrestrial concerns, offering us a glimpse of life everlasting.
And we all lived happily ever after in thrall to Cthulhu, or someone like him. Well, maybe not so happily. Let’s say creepily.