The Seeding is desolate, disappointingly dull horror
Courtesy Magnet Releasing
Single-setting horror can be a great way to deliver effective scares on a tight budget. Think Cube, The Evil Dead, Pontypool. However, as with all things, there are rules to making a good horror movie that never leaves its one location. Chief among them is that everything needs to be tight; there can’t be acres of space between character beats, plot twists or action scenes.
Barnaby Clay’s The Seeding understands the other elements of good single-location storytelling. The characters are interesting. The setting itself is textured and endlessly fascinating—which is good, because we’re going to spend a lot of time there. The truth of what’s actually going on is dispensed in an intriguing breadcrumb trail of slow reveals. Unfortunately, the movie’s inconsistent pacing and surprisingly long timeframe very nearly undo the rest of its spare, brutish strengths. It’s pretty short at 100 minutes. It could have done with being even shorter.
Amateur photographer Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze) is out in the desert snapping photos of an eclipse when he finds a young boy (Charlie Avink) who claims he’s lost his parents. While trying to help the kid out, Wyndham himself gets lost as night falls. He decides to take temporary shelter in an off-grid house at the base of a canyon where a young woman named Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil) offers him water and a place to sleep.
The next day, Wyndham discovers that the ladder he used to climb down to the house is gone. He and Alina are stuck there at the whim of a group of feral boys who stalk the canyon rim cruelly taunting them and occasionally letting down boxes of provisions. Wyndham is determined to get out and get back to his life. Alina, it seems, has been here for ages and has no interest in mounting an escape — whether that’s the result of Stockholm Syndrome or something more sinister will take Wyndham nearly a year to discover.
Music video and short film director Clay (perhaps best known as Mr. Karen O) has a clear knack for sharp visuals. The Seeding was shot just southeast of Utah’s Zion National Park, and makes excellent use of the area’s compelling landscape; its colors, textures and incredible light. Clay’s gang of unruly kids are appropriately jackrabbit-lean, creepy and oddly-dressed, an effective combo of Mad Max and Lord of the Flies.
The problem here is a familiar one that hits filmmakers used to working on much shorter films: there’s not enough material here to fit a feature length. Rather than digging for something to make the story richer or deeper, the film spends a lot of time twiddling its thumbs, keeping Wyndham stuck where he is when getting out doesn’t seem that hard. He tries climbing out a low edge of the canyon, but quits after only a couple of minutes. He tries using a pickaxe to climb, which ends in violent sabotage by the boys, but never attempts it again. If this is meant to comment on Wyndham’s relative weakness in a situation that calls for something more, it’s not as explicit as it should be.
Courtesy Magnet Releasing
The same is true for Sheil’s Alina, who is bizarrely passive until we finally learn why. For whatever reason (probably because it would end things too quickly) Wyndham never asks why she’s there, how long she’s been in the house, or whether she’s tried to get out. When she offers him a spare set of clothes, he never thinks to ask where they came from. Their bizarre relationship stretches on for months, but never develops in ways that would make sense for two people stuck in a single location together for a long time.
With The Seeding, Clay has his vibes down perfectly. He knows what kind of story he wants to tell, and how he wants the audience to feel, and his background sets him up to make that slam dunk perfectly. The problem is that he doesn’t quite know how to tell that story in a way that’s as tight and sharp as his style is. It’s a step toward something really good, but the film isn’t quite strong enough to stand on its own.
The Seeding is out now on VOD.
