Film Review: THE SEEDING: Logline and Soundtrack In Search of a Movie [Tribeca 2023]

The Seeding Review

The Seeding (2023) Film Review from the 22nd Annual Tribeca Film Festival, a movie directed by Barney Clay, written by Barney Clay, and starring Scott Haze, Kate Lyn Sheil, Christa Atkins, Charlie Avink, Thatcher Jacobs, Chelsea Jurkiewicz, Michael Monsour, Alex Montaldo, and Aarman Touré.

A photographer held prisoner in a desert canyon is the unwilling participant in a mysterious ritual.

I’m not a mean person by nature. Really, I’m not.

And I’m not a snob either. I try to find something of value in every artistic endeavor, especially film.

It doesn’t take a ton of money these days to make a decent movie. This is especially true of horror, which has always been a good genre on which aspiring filmmakers could, and have, cut their creative teeth. This is no secret. Horror has universal appeal because it can be applied anywhere — drama, comedy, science fiction, mystery, in any combination.

The prospect of The Seeding must have looked damn good on paper: no expensive sets; a wardrobe available at any thrift store; a lean cast, longer on talent than experience; and a surprisingly large crew complement which, judging from the look of the film overall, perfectly fine. All that said, it’s perplexing why The Seeding went so far south and stayed there.

The film opens auspiciously with a filthy, half naked toddler wandering around a vast desert in the late afternoon sun, nibbling on what turns out to be a human finger. Then a car in the distance distracts us, and the camera follows it to a cul de sac, where a young man gets out to observe a total eclipse. In the gathering dark he encounters a young boy claiming he lost his parents, who baits him into discovering the torchlit canyon where he seeks help from a mysterious young woman who resides in the shack on the canyon floor, where the rest of the action takes place after the bottom rungs of the ladder leading down vanish the next morning.

From this point we witness the storyline descend into an excruciatingly slow and painful death. Okay, so we’ve already guessed that he’s held captive for the tell-all title: he’s there to impregnate the young woman for some nefarious purpose, but there’s a ways to go yet, and the congress between them is like a blind date that’s gone wrong and never ends. The woman is mysterious, all right, with virtually nothing to say for or about herself. But with hardly any information, useful or otherwise, imparted to her captive guest, her mystery is both boring and ultimately pointless.

He tries to escape by improvising ways to climb out of his prison, but a bunch of feral teenage punks foil his plan. What purpose these kids serve other than pulling sophomoric stunts is never made clear; they mostly tease and taunt, but also chant some mantra in unison that, I suppose, is meant to evoke some sort of evil-doing or another. They seem to appear on the canyon floor in an instant, bait and jeer, then disappear just as quickly.

There is one powerful scene, however, when one of this crew is suspended stretched out by his arms and legs over the canyon as punishment for befriending the prisoner. This also marks a curious reaction in the woman’s attitude; suddenly she’s full of piss and vinegar and exiles her unwilling beau to a dog cage outside, and then ignoring him until his release with the birth of his daughter (judging from the swell of the woman’s tummy) about five months later.

Some dead-end clues for the audience are offered, few and far between, without any context, so they don’t amount to anything or lead anywhere. One example marks the passage of time with fancy font title cards of full moon monikers like ‘Blood Moon’ and ‘Strawberry Moon,’ and so forth, imposed over a plate of decomposing fowl and vegetables. (I could swear that ‘Harvest Moon’ was used twice in a row.) There are marks in black covering the walls above the woman’s bed, to which she adds another in red (menstrual blood?) with her index and middle finger.

Aside from the impressive production values, another real standout is Scott Haze’s performance as the hapless hiker and doomed dad; he manages remarkable range and depth with the weak material.

It seems major resources were committed to this project, considering the size of the crew. The composer (Tristan Bechet) has a lot to answer for. The soundtrack is certainly creepy — creepy and loud, as if using more decibels would offset the shallow plot. Yet I can’t shake the feeling that at some point there was a really good idea floating around this project. Something about the savage allure of primeval folk religion, along the lines of Wicker Man, The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, or even Children of the Corn?

Rating: 3/10

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