Movie Nation

In film buff slang, “Felliniesque” conveys a a lot of cinematic shorthand in just a single word. It can mean a self-conscious artist self-conscious about her or his self-consciousness. The word is almost synonymous with existential angst and cultural ennui.

And since the term most quickly summons up memories of “La Dolce Vita” or its bookend, “8 1/2,” there’s a lightness about it — self-criticism as cultural criticism, most often with an amused, arm’s length take on decadence and society’s shortcomings.

That “lightness” means it’s not the perfect fit in describing Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s angsty social satire “Ahed’s Knee.” The title may echo Eric Rohmer’s pre #MetToo older-man/teen-girls cringe comedy “Claire’s Knee.” But Lapid (“The Kindergarten Teacher”) is grappling with something more elemental about an artist’s role in society and his own place in an increasingly reactionary and groupthink-authoritarian Israel.

A Palestinian teen named Ahed Tamimi, whose family has suffered deaths and imprisonment at the hands of Israeli occupiers, lashed out at a soldier and had the temerity to slap him. The video became an international stink as Israel threw the kid in prison.

“Ahed’s Knee” begins with a disorienting, stream-of-camera-in-extreme-close-up musical audition session for a movie about her. Israeli (not Palestinian) actresses — Ortal Solomon, Neta Roth and Mili Eshet — sing “Welcome to the Jungle,” show off expensive dental work and the tear in their leggings at the knee, don wigs and hurl themselves into the part for a jaded filmmaker, “Y” (Avshalom Pollak) and his casting director.

We hear an actor, playing the part of a government official, grouse that Ahed — who faced house arrest — “should have gotten a bullet in the knee” because THAT would have kept her in the house, “arrested.”

And maybe we see what Y sees in that moment. The very idea of some privileged, acting-schooled Israeli Jew playing this icon of Palestinian resistance to oppression is patently offensive. Then again, maybe that’s not crossed Y’s mind...yet.

As he sits in a small plane en route to the town of Sapir for an afternoon screening of one of his earlier films at a local library, we pick up on Y’s discontent. The son of artists, his collaborator/screenwriter mother has cancer. When he talks, he mutters (in Hebrew) about the “dumbing down of this country” thanks to “censorship,” message-control, leading to a populace that “revels in its stupidity.”

He downloads all this simmering concern on the young, perky culture ministry functionary (Nur Fibak) who welcomes him, briefs him on the town, the desert region (Avra) it is in and how the evening’s screening and Q&A will go. She smiles prettily and makes lots of eye contact. The leather-jacketed Y, stubbly and 40something and single, takes on a familiarity with her that whispers “chemistry” or hints at least that he’s interested.

But there’s this form from “the ministry,” the list of subjects he’s allowed to speak about (and get paid for). She chirps on about “the sea,” life, love, “Jewish immigration,” and Y grouses about “no mention of the occupation, conflict” and the like.

There’s a crisis of conscience in play, and we sense a tirade to come. “Ahed’s Knee” is about that day in Sapir, from arrival to screening to debating that “approved” list of topics and the State of the State of Israel, where an artist might well feel the walls of free expression closing in on him thanks to decades of corrupt, thought-controlling reactionary rule.

Lapid’s storytelling style here includes odd interludes — a driver (Yoram Honig) takes the filmmaker to his room, pausing to show him the rotting result of a failed deal with the Russians over the bell pepper harvest, pausing again for a little sing-along and dance-along to Bill Withers’ ironically-used “Lovely Day.”

Y relates an anecdote from his national military service days that musically sends up the homoerotic nature of military service (more dancing) and underscores his point about how “off message” unapproved thought and talk are suppressed, beginning with that heady dose of military indoctrination.

“Felliniesque” kicks in with the seriously roundabout way Lapid gets to the story at hand and the various, occasionally daft interludes. I can’t say it all fits together neatly or that it all contributes to the narrative in a particularly helpful, streamlined way. But it’s easy enough to make sense of.

Pollak, a veteran of film sets in front of and behind the camera, wears his RayBans and five-day stubble like a movie-making egoist, imposing himself — conversationally — on women he doesn’t know, like the small plane pilot who transports him, interrupting a power ballad singer rehearsing with her bassist in a Sapir garage, and the captive, somewhat star-struck Yahalom (Fibak) escorting him around, hearing him out and professing sympathy for his anti “censorship” ethos, perhaps because she has some carnal interest in him.

Lapid’s film ambles along, never straying far from its path but dawdling and stopping for distracting little bits of business — one of the actresses auditioning for him calls to obnoxiously lobby for the part, that pause at the bell pepper farm, a couple of somewhat aimless thinking/ phone-chatting walk-abouts in the Avra desert.

“Ahed’s Knee” isn’t as sexy, satiric and light as its Felliniesque opening promises. But Lapid manages to make a lot of points about the creative person’s life in modern Israel, the sensitivities triggered and the moral quandary a thinking Israeli finds her or himself in. The writer-director does a decent job of cloaking a sermon about artistic freedom in a tale of an artist at an intellectual crossroads and a man fixated on the fate of “Ahed’s Knee.”

Rating: unrated, profanity, violence

Cast: Avshalom Pollak, Nur Fibak, Yoram Honig, Ortal Solomon, Neta Roth and Mili Eshet

Credits: Scripted and directed by Nadav Lapid. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:49

“The Left Handed Gun” has a distinct pride of place in Paul Newman lore.

He’d already risen to stardom, not nearly as quickly as Brando, but quick enough to earn the envy of his life-long rival, Steve McQueen.”Somebody Up There Likes Me” pretty much ended Newman’s days of bit parts on TV and supporting roles on film.

And here he was, the lead in a star-vehicle Western, the “pretty boy” of the moment, his increasingly famous bright blue eyes dulled down in black and white. But more than anything else, this film and Newman’s movies of this era cemented his reputation as a serious actor.

He’d played Billy the Kid on TV three years before he stepped in front of the camera for Arthur Penn, whom he’d once acted for on the anthology series “Playwrights ’56.” Now Penn was making his major motion picture directing debut, and Newman would perfect his take on The Kid.

It wasn’t until later researchers looked hard at the most famous photograph of William Bonney and realized it was an inverted negative that the fact that Billy was actually right-handed became established. So there’s no faulting Gore Vidal, who wrote the teleplay that Newman had starred in, and helped expand and flesh it out, with screenwriter Leslie Stevens, for the big screen.

What was novel about the TV treatment and this later film is how unsentimental it is about Bonney, romanticized for 75 years, largely thanks to his name and youth. Watching “Gun” again, I was reminded of the ad campaign for Sam Peckinpah’s even gloomier take on the character, played by Kris Kristofferson in 1973’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.”

“Billy the Kid was a Punk.”

Newman’s “kid” carries a grudge all the way to his grave in this film. Taken in by the rancher Tunstall (Colin Keith-Johnston), a kindly Scotsman who took pity, put trust in Billy and turned him into a reader, Billy makes it his short life’s work to avenge Tunstall’s murder by law enforcement put up to it by his rivals.

There’s nothing sentimental about this Old West. Billy goads men that were a part of the conspiracy into gunfights, and kills others who stand in his way with barely a hint of righteousness in his revenge.

The striking thing about the movie is catching Newman just before “star clout” kicked in. He may have gotten his former TV director on board, but he played up “the kid” nature of his character just by denying himself the vanity of a horse that wouldn’t make him look so short. Watch the first time he mounts up in the movie. It’s like a tween climbing a tree, scrambling to do it quickly just to minimize any chance of “You man enough for that there hoss?” derision from the other cowhands. Check out the much shorter horse he rides as “Butch Cassidy,” in comparison.

His performance is wound-tight yet subtle, boyishly antic and just mature enough to let us see the character’s realization that he’s done wrong or made a fatal mistake.

But what really stood out on this re-viewing was the superb support Newman got from future Western icon John Dehner, turned into a wholly-logical and perfectly understandable Pat Garrett, the old running mate turned lawman who hunts The Kid down. Vidal’s take on the character is sharp, and all the best Garretts are descendants of this one. Dehner plays Pat as patient-and-understanding, but accepting of the fact that The Kid has earned his fate and he’s the one to make him meet it.

Dehner played many a heavy in Westerns and authority figures in other films and on TV, and later earned his own measure of immortality with a hilarious send-up of his booming, owlish Western persona as a comic villain in James Garner’s “Support Your Local Gunfighter.”

Denver Pyle’s most famous big screen role was in Arthur Penn’s greatest film, “Bonnie and Clyde,” released nearly ten years later. As in that film, he’s a lawman here.

And James Best almost left his bit player/character actor career behind after his flinty, empathetic turn as Billy’s fellow cowhand, friend and conscience, Tom Folliard. Best was never able to establish himself as a “name” star or leading man. He’s most remembered for his role as the hapless sheriff on TV’s “Dukes of Hazzard” twenty years later. He retired to my corner of Florida, spending most of his last years as a Space Coast celebrity.

There’s nothing flashy save for the performances in Penn’s debut feature. If anything, the first act seems rushed, with character development and detail skipped over. Television directors had to work quickly and TV screenplays had to be brisk and truncated. It takes a while for a style and patience to settle in.

It may not stand out the way “The Left Handed Gun” did when it hit the screen in ’58, a bracing counterpoint to the tsunami of formulaic “Manifest Destiny/Code of the West” Westerns that came before it on the big screen, and the generic Western fare already flooding TV, which it would continue to do into the late ’60s. The action sequences are blunt instruments and the grace notes tend to overwhelm them.

But the performances still crackle with understated modernity, giving us a West of not just sagebrush, saddles and stereotypes, but of real people, ruthless and impulsive, cunning and careless, actors playing folks who never let on that they know how this many-times-told story is going to end.

Rating: approved, violence

Cast: Paul Newman, John Dehner, James Best, Lita Milan, Denver Pyle, Hurd Hatfield, Colin Keith-Johnston, Martin Garralaga, Wally Brown and Paul Smith

Credits: Directed by Arthur Penn, scripted by Leslie Stevens, based on a Gore Vidal TV script. A Warner Brothers release available on Amazon and most any streaming platform.

Running time: 1:42

It’s good to see JA found Jesus and cleaned up his potty mouth. And stopped casting relatives.

April Fool’s…is when this comes to Netflix.

Looks like he’s hoping to get a little Brit drollery into this farce about making a sci fi B movie action sequel under lockdown.

Could go either way.

If writer/director/producer/cinematographer/editor and composer Adrian Langley can’t make sense of his muddled thriller “Ash & Dust,” what hope do we mere mortal viewers have?

I mean, kudos for wearing all those hats at once, chief. But all those extra voices you might have had on the set could have told you, “Wait man, this doesn’t make any sense.”

It’s a murderous tale of rural North America, all about the killing people will do to get their hands on this anachronistic box, whose contents we’ll just leave a mystery because that’s what Mr. Langley does.

“Ash” begins with a wintry woodlands chase and execution set in the horseback pursuer/over-under shotgun past.

“Y’can’t outrun fate,” our killer tells his frontier victim before grabbing a box that looks a hundred years more modern than it should.

A century or more later, a guy whose dog gets mauled and killed digs that perfectly-preserved wooden box up whilst burying his pet. He makes the mistake of getting a coin from that box appraised, and all of a sudden a whole daisy chain of killers and relatives-of-killers set upon him, his wife and anybody else they think might have an inkling of where that box is.

We see a thug (Nick Biskupek) and his moll snort cocaine off the box. But that’s not what’s in it.

We see the thug’s nephew (Blake Canning), with a pregnant wife or girlfriend, join in the shenanigans, asking for “work.”

“You know what we do?”

A guy’s shot, left for dead and survives. A laconic loner cop (Kayla Meyer) walks onto various crime scenes and ponders ponders ponders whatever the hell is going on here and whoever the hell it is that’s doing it.

There’s a whole hierarchy of folks — one with an eyepatch, one with a British accent — who want that box, and as most aren’t called by name, I’ll decline to try and look them up. See the credits below for the names of the cast, whose performances range from indifferent to inept.

It’s a difficult movie to get a handle on partly because the timeline seems to jump back and forth. That cop/sheriff wanders upon a crucifixion in a snow-covered field, the young guy drives up to a house in what looks like early fall and inside that house, we see snow out the windows and characters’ breath fogs up as they engage in a little lick the pistol barrel sexual foreplay.

Back and forth it goes, with even its “revenge” motto — that Confucius quote about when you embark on a journey of revenge, remember to “dig two graves” — seeming totally wrong. The first murders and tortures we see have nothing to do with that. Greed is the engine that drives this story, or would if it had any wheels on it.

Simple as it is, “Ash & Dust” lurches between incoherent and shout-at-the-screen mess and there’s barely a minute that’s worth sitting through the other 83 minutes of it for.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Michael Swatton, Kayla Meyer, Simon Philips, Nick Biskupek, Olivia Tilly, Blake Canning and Anne-Carolyne Binette

Credits: Scripted and directed by Adrian Langley. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:24

A tragic accident of war is remembered in the quiet and wrenching Danish World War II drama, “The Bombardment,” a film about the day the RAF came to destroy Copenhagen’s Gestapo headquarters and hit a nearby school as well.

Titled, “The Shadow in My Eye (Skyggen i mit øje)” in Denmark, writer-director Ole Bornedal’s film hews to classic disaster movie formula, following several story threads — the lives of those who will be thrown together on that fateful day in the last months of the war.

Frederick (Alex Høgh Andersen) is a working class lad who joined the wrong side, something his enraged father never lets him forget. He’s in the HIPO, Denmark’s secret police, collaborators with the Gestapo who often do the Germans’ dirty work for them. He’s conflicted, but realistic enough to know “the war is lost” and “I’m a dead man.”

Teresa (Fanny Bornedal) is a nun, a teacher at the French Catholic School, so upset at what she’s seen in this war that she questions her faith.

Eva (Ella Josephine Lund Nilsson) is a student, as are cousins Rigmor (Ester Birch) and Henry (Bertram Bisgaard Enevoldsen). He’s witnessed another bloody accident at the start of the film, a wedding party strafed by an RAF Mosquito as they drove to the ceremony. Henry has stopped speaking due to the trauma, and his sister and her friend Eva have little luck getting him to talk again.

There are Danish Resistance fighters, many being rounded up as the Gestapo and HIPO close in, even with the war going so badly for the Axis elsewhere. These fighters know that they only thing that will spare those not already rounded-up and being tortured is a raid on a commandeered Shell Oil building in the center of the city where they Gestapo and HIPO hold prisoners as “human shields” against an air raid.

Some of those Resistance prisoners even know that the RAF has reluctantly agreed to carry out that raid.

Bornedal sets his film in the normalcy of civilian life — families eating and quarreling before school, where the children of Nazi officers inject anti-Semitism into lessons, gently-corrected by the less anti-Semitic nuns. But “Bombardment” is weighted with the doom that the Resistance, the jackbooted HIPO “traitors” and the nervous aircrews prepping for a deadly, little-margin-for-error rooftop level air raid, “Operation Carthage,” that they all know is coming.

I was convinced during the film’s first act that Bornedal (“Nightwatch”) had over-reached, included too many storylines and sidebars. It’s hard to keep everything and everyone straight in your mind and their place in the story.

The troubled, questioning nun is into self-flagellation as she seeks evidence of God in the middle of mass murder.

“We’re not 15th century Jesuits,” her prioress (Susse Wold) scolds her, in Danish or dubbed into English.

Sister Teresa also has dangerous interactions with the traitor Frederik. Young Henry struggles to recover his speech with little effective help from a bullying doctor. The RAF crews are flying in guilt, as they know about their previous mistaken strafing. And more and more Resistance members are picked-up and tortured or summarily executed.

But the sound of “ticking” on the soundtrack takes us into the crowded cockpits of those two-seat bombers, into the school and inside the infamous Shell Building as the picture thunders towards a climax.

“Bombardment” pulls you in, and like the worst videos from Russia’s murderous invasion of Ukraine, doesn’t flinch from showing us the heartbreaking slaughter of war and its frantic-search-for-survivors aftermath.

If you’ve seen other Danish films set during World War II, you’ll know that they generally adhere to a couple of basic narratives. There are stories of the plucky little country’s defiant Resistance to the murderous, morally bankrupt invaders. And we get versions of the oft-repeated account of how they smuggled most of the Jews living there out of the country before the Germans could seize them. Here’s a movie that shows us that not all Danes were righteous, that reminds us that the “neutral” Danes were occupied as a protectorate.

I was struck by how current and topical it all feels. There are still air attack accidents that hit wedding parties and schools and the bad guys are still in the habit of using “human shields” and compiling hit lists of those who resist tyranny.

The flying scenes, bathed in rain and fog, are quite convincing and the delayed fuse (“time bomb”) explosions are more grimly realistic than theatrical.

And the faces of the rescuers, the weepy, frantic parents and the victims will leave you gutted, no matter how numb we’ve all become to the horrors of war and its grisly body count.

Rating: TV-MA, torture, graphic violence

Cast: Alex Høgh Andersen, Fanny Bornedal, Ester Birch, Bertram Bisgaard Enevoldsen, Alex Figueiredo, Casper Kjær Jensen and Olaf Johannessen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ole Bornedal. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

Pedro Pascal plays the rich dude who hires Nicolas Cage to come hang, Tiffany Haddish and her bud Ike Barinholtz are CIA agents who need Nic Cage’s help, and Neil Patrick Harris is his agent in this potentially hilarious self own/spoof.

As he has proven, time and again over his checkered career, that Nic Cage is down for ANYthing.

April 22.

Somewhere on the dystopian Road to Nowhere — Destination Thunderdome –a drifter stumbles across a giant nugget and must battle the desert, snakes, scorpions and wild dogs, interlopers and his sketchy partner to hang onto his hunk of “Gold.”

That’s the premise of this “Treasure of the Terra Australis,” a down and dirty and entirely-too-minimalist sci-fi spin on what greed does to a man. So little happens that this might have passed unnoticed had Zac Efron not signed on to star and take a suffer-for-your-art paid vacation in the Outback.

Anthony Hayes‘ film’s stark, arid beauty reminds us of why so many primal tales — apocalyptic to horror to “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” — have been set there. There are no distractions and survival is visually reduced to its most elemental — water, shelter from the heat, and transportation to get the hell out of there.

As Efron’s loner notes to the roughneck (director and co-writer Hayes) he hires to drive him across it, “It is what it is.”

That goes for the nugget, which is too huge to move without help, and the movie itself. As the driver must go off to obtain the gear to extract it, Efron’s limping, scarred survivor of whatever reduced civilization to this, must stay alive, protect their “claim” and keep his wits in the baking heat and other tests this too-simple thriller throws at him.

Susie Porter plays an Irish-accented trekker curious about what the Man with No Name is doing here, scavenging a crashed airplane for shelter, lighting fires at night to keep away the “dogs” nobody dares call “dingoes.”

I like the look and minimalism in play here. But at some point, something needs to happen — something more, anyway.

Hayes blows the “discovery” moment and gives his own character lines that hint at a gentility his brute of a driver-bloke might have once had — “I don’t mean to condescend to you or nothing,” but this desert can leave a lad in a very bad spot “indeed.”

Efron, covered in stubble, scars, grime and flies, doesn’t do enough to animate the character, give away his past or consider his interior life. He’s just there, exerting himself despite having little water, and we assume going a tad mad over the few days that are the film’s timeframe.

“Gold” isn’t really bad. It’s just not enough to amount to anything, or anything much.

Rating: R for language and some violent content

Cast: Zac Efron, Anthony Hayes, Susie Porter

Credits: Directed by Anthony Hayes, scripted by Anthony Hayes and Polly Smyth. A Screen Media release.

Running time: 1:37

A “different” sort of marriage, with rampant cheating and murder.

Lil Rel Howery and Tracy Letts also star in this Mar. 18 Prime Video release.

Encounters with real-life survivors of the Holocaust can be wrenchingly emotional. The stories of suffering and travail, the grim resignation of starvation and sudden, brutal death all around you, the soul-searing realization of the inhumanity of humanity can turn even a stony heart into a puddle of tears.

The first survivor I ever interviewed was in Charlotte, N.C., when I worked for a public radio station there. I’ve been grateful that every such interview I’ve done since was for newspapers, because keeping one’s composure can be a real struggle when listening to such narratives, doubly so when you’re in front of a live mike.

“I Am Here” tells the remarkable story of Ella Blumenthal, a survivor who came to the filmmaker’s attention for writing a compassionate “loving” open letter to a Holocaust denier, insisting there was more “that unites us than divides us.”

Born in Warsaw in 1921, Ella was the youngest in her family and one of only three extended family members to survive the mass deportation, enslavement and murder of Jews by Nazi Germany. She witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, hid out in a walled-in basement with her father and niece, and survived not one but three Nazi concentration camps — Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.

Framing the film with Ella’s 98th birthday party, with family gathered around her, South African documentarian Jordy Sank captures a woman of wit, warmth and pathos as she interacts with her family. She shows old photographs and embraces great grandchildren, grandchildren and her children, who remember hearing her night terrors growing up and the “story” she told them about the car accident she used to explain the scar on her arm, the one where the tattoo with “48632” and a triangle, “for Jews,” used to be.

Sank uses newsreel footage and animated recreations of Ella’s experiences as she narrates her story. We see and hear of the idyllic childhood interrupted by invasion, the terrifying upheaval that entered her life, her fleeing, hiding out and her eventual capture and deportation.

With executions and people starving to death all around her, one cannot help but be moved by the many awful tests of Blumenthal’s touching story of endurance. She even chillingly recalls being stripped and “pushed into a gas chamber” with her niece Roma, comforting the child with “We’ll see our loved ones soon,” only to have the officious Germans open the door with a gruff announcement that they’d met their “quota” for the day.

Through it all, “I never lost hope.” To her offspring, she lectures “Who left this biscuit?” Wasting food remained a cardinal sin for someone who nearly starved many times over five hellish years.

And to the great grandkids who might doubt her, “It’s not a STORY. This really happened!”

But this film’s sentimental depiction of Ella Blumenthal’s later years, thriving and raising a family, gives it a problematic, unspoken subtext. There’s a South African elephant in the room that the South African filmmaker didn’t notice. As we see images from Ella and her husband’s thriving Johannesburg retail clothing establishment in the 1960s, of course we don’t see a single Black face among the staff or the customers.

The Blumenthals lived their entire married lives, with Ella surviving her husband, in the most racist country on Earth. Are we to believe this woman who went through so much in her teens and 20s didn’t have reactions, even flashbacks, seeing the violent removal and relocations of millions of Black South Africans in the 1960s, ’70s and 80s, the “separation” and brutally violent repression of the nation’s majority native-born population?

She didn’t have opinions? Even if she didn’t speak out due to past trauma or fear, surely she had something to say about that. Why not ask? And since you the filmmaker didn’t ask, we left wondering what we don’t know.

Not even touching on this in the most basic documentarian’s CYA way makes this film problematic in the least, damning if there are stories of exploitation and racism woven into what has to be a more complicated family history than Sank presents here.

I dare say only a South African filmmaker would have so conspicuously avoided that, but only if he was planning on showing it mostly abroad. Hearing Blumenthal’s adult children talk to her and about her in their Afrikaans accents just underscores it.

There’s an urgency to every film capturing the stories of the last of the survivors. There are scores of these documentaries, and every survivor telling her or his story is varying degrees of gripping, moving and “life affirming” in that “we must go on” way. Blumenthal’s stirring story would be an invaluable addition to any anthology of various survivors’ experiences.

But when the ethos of keeping these stories alive is “Never Again,” and “Never again” was happening again right in front of Ella Blumenthal and her entire family for decades upon decades, it isn’t “off message” for your movie to make some effort to address it.

Ignoring that is disingenuous at best, and tone deaf at the very least.

Rating: unrated, discussions of genocidal violence

Cast: Ella Blumenthal, her children and grandchildren

Credits: Directed by Jordy Sank. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:12

There’s no horror movie that’s ever been made that wouldn’t benefit from a proper blood-curdling scream, delivered at the right moment by a character under life-threatening distress.

Screen veteran Melora Walters of “Dead Poet’s Society,” “Beneath the Leaves,” “Big Love” and scores of other credits, delivers a doozie of a shriek to open “Offseason.” Playing a vampy actress-mother, she tells her story to the camera, and perhaps her daughter, of running, of “never going back.”

But “Wherever I went,” she laments, “there they were!”

“Offseason” is about that daughter (Jocelin Donahue) being summoned back to the island where her mother is buried. Her tombstone’s “been vandalized.” A storm is ‘a’coming.” So she’d best make it to this remote, palm and palmetto-covered section of the southern coast, where the drawls are thick and the mystery thicker.

Boyfriend George (“Mumblecore” mainstay Joe Swanberg of “Drinking Buddies”) is her hapless, somewhat put-out driver for this emergency trip. He’s the one ready to turn back the moment they reach the drawbridge where the tender (Richard Brake) warns them it’ll be locked up — for the storm, and for the season — if they don’t hurry.

George, of course, is right. Anybody living along the southern coast knows drawbridges are locked “down” not up in storms. There’s something fishy about an island hellbent on being isolated during “off season.”

What ensues is a “Twilight Zone” waking nightmare, with apparitions in the saw palmetto forest and creepers all gathered at the Sand Trap, the local bar where we see just how “off” the inhabitants all seem and how unfriendly they most certainly are.

Daughter Marie finds herself on a lonely quest through the vacant village, along the spooky beach (the “storm” is an indifferent presence, mostly-forgotten), remembering her talks with her mother, scaring George to death with an account she never told him that her mother passed on to her. Mom “didn’t want to be buried here,” no how, no way.

George is, like the viewer, thrilled with this revelation and that it came too late to get them off the island, or keep him from agreeing to risk his neck and his late model Mercedes on whatever the hell Marie’s family’s mixed up in.

Writer-director Mickey Keating, while taking a step up from “Darling” and “Psychopaths,” can’t help but lean on pointless crutches like “chapter” headings for an 83 minute movie. We don’t need to be told a sequence is set in “Lone Palm” cemetery or “The Sand Trap,” or that a character’s about to meet “The Damned.”

And golly, there’s that “locked-up” bridge thing, no necessary to the plot but illogical on every level. Again, the storm bearing down on them is dispensed with. For that matter, who in the name of Jamie Lee Curtis would risk life, limb, boyfriend and Mercedes over a vandalized tombstone?

But Donahue (“Doctor Sleep”) makes a properly spooked heroine, antsy as she pokes around an empty village, puzzling out an answer to this mystery which early on she hints has to do with her fate.

Swanberg? He does “irked” and “ill-used” well. And the locals, including Jeremy Gardner as “The Fisherman,” may be horror tropes, but they’re interesting variations on a theme.

The occasional blood-curdling scream notwithstanding, “Offseason” is more chilling and gloomy than frightening. But the fog, the creepy old coots, the formidable drawbridge as an obstacle and Mama’s cryptic warnings and horror diva shrieks tip the scales. There’s a reason the locals call it “off season,” after all. “Stay away” sounds too hostile.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Jeremy Gardner and Melora Walters

Credits: Scripted and directed by Mickey Keating. A Shudder/RLJE release.

Running time: 1:23