The Seeding takes a tack from the likes of Ari Aster, working to instill a sense of dread rather than jump scares and creating horror through atrophy.
And while writer-director Barnaby Clay emulates Aster and a lot of other talented filmmakers, he doesn’t do much with a well-worn premise — recycling plot points and twists to create a film we’ve seen before instead of delivering the provocative, interesting movie for which he’s shooting.
Scott Haze (who has had small- to medium-sized roles in films like Venom (2018), Jurassic World: Dominion and Sound of Freedom) leads as Wyndham Stone, a man whose name we learn only from his driver’s license. A photographer, Wyndham ventures out to a remote desert to take pictures of an eclipse … and gets lost.
He ventures to a small canyon, led away by a mysterious boy who asks for his help and then runs from him. Inside the canyon, though, is a house where a woman named Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil) lives alone on meager but sufficient resources. Wyndham climbs down the conveniently placed rope ladder and stumbles into the home, not knowing he’s about to become a prisoner.
Alina is alluring in the way a tired, young man lost in the desert may regard her, but she’s not exactly big on talking. She speaks and moves quietly, so Wyndham doesn’t ask questions he may otherwise have of others. When he wakes up the next morning, the ladder is gone, trapping him with Alina. Periodically, a group of boys ventures to the top of the surrounding cliffs to taunt, torment or throw food and supplies to them.
The Seeding drags the viewer through this narrative, generally not providing answers to questions in any sort of satisfying way. It’s not difficult to figure out what’s going on, but the film treats its revelations as shocking twists. They’re not, and Wyndham’s general lunkheadedness becomes tiresome quite a while before he makes the connection.
The villains are Children of the Corn by way of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but it seems like the filmmakers behind The Seeding haven’t really studied either of those films to make their own scary. They offer help to Wyndham (who never questions why Alina does not herself need help out of the canyon) and give him hope of escape only to leave him hanging (sometimes literally).
Instead, as we learn from Alina, they’re “feral,” a gang of boys who somehow survive in the desert despite a lack of resources that left Wyndham dragging after just a few hours. They mostly hang around and ask questions, throw things or cackle in a way that’s more irritating than menacing, like a group of bored middle-schoolers pestering a substitute teacher.
Clay makes use of his surroundings, meaning to make the desert a de facto character in the film. We see images of creatures devouring each other or the remaining evidence of such feasting. Somehow, though, they feel like empty visuals, appearing provocative and eerie but not quite landing; it’s an apt metaphor for the film as a whole.
His use of chapter cards, conveying titles like “Sturgeon Moon,” “Harvest Moon” and “Cold Moon,” feel more like affectations than transitions. They are evocative of other, better movies that do these things for reasons that become clear over time. Here, they’re meant to coincide with the moon’s phases in relation to … something, but they feel utterly detached from the narrative.
The Seeding aims to expose the horrors of nature in human form and largely succeeds in that endeavor. But by emulating numerous other films to such a slavish degree, it creates a largely dull experience that fails to be compelling or even interesting most of the time.