Review: ‘Offseason’ is a spiritual remake of ‘Carnival of Souls’

If you told me Offseason was a remake of the 1962 bone-chiller Carnival of Souls, I would believe you. Everything about the Mickey Keating-directed feature, hitting Shudder today (June 10), owes an immense debt to its obvious predecessor and biggest influence (Keating has stated Japanese horror, namely Dark Water, inspired him most). Dread hangs on the camera, as thick as the fog that blankets a hidden tourist island, and that unease transmits to the audience with a dull, body-numbing electricity. You sense something’s amiss from the very first frame, yet you can’t look away. Keating stages an enthralling ghost story about human deterioration, inherited trauma, and grief, with Jocelin Donahue leading the charge.

Ava Aldrich (Melora Walters), once Hollywood royalty, owes a debt in death. “Don’t be afraid. I found peace. Everything comes to an end, they say. They also say life goes on,” she muses from her sick bed. Nightmares, she believes, melt into your being. You can run, and you can hide. But they always find you eventually. Some learn to accept this inevitability before they’ve even managed to shake loos their mortal coil. Others aren’t nearly as fortunate (or tortured, depending on how you perceive it). Ava had the burden have not only bearing this truth but concealing it from her daughter, right up until her angel light extinguished for good. Stricken with dementia, she’d already known the cold blade of death, only momentarily passing into and out of lucidity as a ghost trapped in purgatory.

Months following Ava’s demise, her daughter Marie (Donahue) receives word her mother’s gravestone, located on a secluded island, has been vandalized and needs prompt attention. Along with her on-again, off-again lover George (Joe Swanberg), she drives hours down the coastline to meet the bridge keeper before the entrance is shuttered until the spring. Cracks of thunder, seagull trills, and crashing waves soundtrack their arrival on a near-apocalyptic scene. The last straggling tourists departed days ago, leaving behind a handful of sea-faring locals. Marie and George are met with derision, but they forge ahead to the cemetery and attend to matters anyway.

They can’t seem to track down the caretaker, however, and amble through the countryside looking for answers. “She didn’t want to come back here. She didn’t want to be buried here. She tried to tell me,” laments Marie upon reuniting with George after becoming separated. A particularly panoramic sequence, as Keating pans outward from the beach’s sandy shores to give the audience a haunting glimpse into the endless expanses between destinations, positions the scope and distance that divides Marie and her mother’s pain from the rest of humanity. Marie calls for George, whose shadow meanders away from her on the horizon. Her cries fall on deaf ears, and with no one around to help, it’s a journey only she can sojourn.

That’s usually how it goes. As we travel through our 20s and 30s, we live and fail and learn how stand on our own two feet, sometimes victims to our past and tethered in chains to inherited traumas. Much like Marie, we bury glaring truths beneath layers of coping mechanisms and emotional decay, piling up our bodies behind barricades and detaching ourselves from life. We’re not really living; we just pretend. Marie has been tossed into a massive, swirling hurricane, forced to contend with her mother’s secrets, a curse that plagues the island, and her own grief. She’s a tangled being, confused and bereft, a kindred spirit with Mary Henry in Carnival of Souls. Both must accept reality — or else they become even more damned than they already are.

Heavy on style and theme, Offseason is one of the year’s finest poetic statements. Mickey Keating works overtime with cinematographer Mac Fisken to bring a mood so suffocating you could slice it with a butcher’s knife. From brilliant uses of color (the red light special is of particular note) to Donahue’s intricate performance, the film is a trembling, quiet, and relentless force of nature. It’s perhaps not reinventing the wheel, but it does leave a terrifying scar on the brain.

Offseason is now streaming on Shudder.

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