
The filming locations for Mercury in Retrograde are variously given as Allegan, Fennville, and Saugatuck. All three are towns in Allegan County, Michigan, a corner of Western Michigan known for being on Lake Michigan and for producing your prescription drugs. Saugatuck, on the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, is an art colony and incongrous gay mecca in the middle of Dutch Reformed country. My family rented a cabin there for decades, and I knew the area well even before I went to college in nearby Kalamazoo. Holland, the setting of the recent, eponymous Holland, is just over the county line to the north.
This accounts for my interest in Mercury in Retrograde, which is a movie about three couples in a cabin in the woods for the weekend but is not a horror movie. It’s a low-key drama about three couples who loosely know each other and who spend a weekend together away from the city. There are no creatures, no mysterious forces at play. To misquote Sartre, in this film horror is other people. I don’t usually watch this sort of movie, and I’m really glad I did.
The cabin in question is the Fern Hollow Cabin, which is available for rental. At the risk of a digression, it’s not really in Fennville. To my mind it’s in Ganges, west of the Blue Star Highway and south of the I-196 interchange. Never made it to the What Not Inn for dinner but was always curious. The location is a perfect distillation of cabin life in that part of the state. You’re in dune country, with the trees so thick that the light barely penetrates. Myrtle covers the ground. In the evening rain patters on the cabin’s roof. I was having feelings before the action even got going.