Tribeca Film Festival 2023: THE SEEDING

Watching The Seeding, music video director Barnaby Clay‘s debut feature, questions abound. Unfortunately, at least for me, one of them was, “Is it over yet?” The film is an amalgam of tropes from the folk horror boom of the late 2010s, complete with matriarchal earth goddess imagery (Midsommar), unnecessary “chapters” intended to add gravitas to the generally dull proceedings (The Green Knight), and shots of the local environ to create that all-important elevated horror tool, “atmosphere.” Additionally, there are references to The Shining, The Hills Have Eyes, Antichrist, The Children of the Corn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even, for some unfathomable reason, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (I kid you not: “What is your favorite color?”). Which brings us back to the questions sparked by the film, namely “Why not go watch any of the much better movies listed above instead?” 

Stuck

The basic plot goes something like this: A man with no backstory (Scott Haze, Antlers) goes into the desert to take photos of a solar eclipse. When he finds a suspiciously knowing-looking, seemingly lost boy, he follows him until he’s lost his own way. Soon he comes upon a house deep in a pit (the film’s best feature – nay, its star – is the pit, an ingenious, tragically underutilized location someone else should put to better use in the future) and climbs down a ladder to investigate.

He finds a reserved woman (Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow) living alone there who proves less than helpful when the ladder goes missing. Intrigue ensues, a quiet battle of wits between the two main characters in the form of subdued conversations about Men and Women’s Roles and the Mysteries of Reproduction interspersed with bouts of tepidly comic hollering (OOOH GOD!!!) and grunting from The Man. Sadly, the film’s attempts to generate tone and intrigue can’t overcome the obstacles of a weak, confusing script (passed off here as “ambiguous”) and an uneven performance from its leading man, who fails to bring life to a character badly in need of some (yelling doesn’t count). 

The presence of Kate Lyn Sheil, who’s doing her best with the little she’s given here, puts the film in dialogue with Mumblegore films like You’re Next and Sun Don’t Shine (both featuring Sheil). Yet, the effectiveness of Mumblecore and its bloody sibling Mumblegore is predicated on low-fi, personality-driven improvisational storytelling, whereas the eldritch pleasures of folk horror often lie in their carefully calibrated scripts and inventive scare scenes, all geared towards a single theme. Clay, it seems, is trying to do both with The Seeding, landing in the blandly allegorical territory of an off-brand Lars Von Trier that lacks the juicy payoffs that make a slow burn of this nature worth it. The nature of “the seeding” in question, meant to be a riff on masculine anxieties and maternal authority, falls flat. The film keeps telling you that something nasty is going to happen (“We don’t waste anything in the desert” wink wink) but, spoilers: it doesn’t.  The few practical effects we do get are great, which is perhaps crueler for the audience as it builds up hope for more to come. The folksy, heavy-on-the-menstrual-blood production design (David S. Bridson) and dusty cinematography (Robert Leitzell) also seem to be pulled from a movie with more meat on its bones than this one. 

Conclusion:

When The Man first discovers he’s been trapped in the pit, he attempts to scale its walls and escape on his own. Shot in an extreme wide meant to convey the impossibility of his cosmic predicament, I could immediately see several apparently feasible routes out. The Man chooses to ignore these convenient nooks and crannies, opting instead for an extreme vertical cliff face – much to his detriment. Clay seems to have made the same decision, consistently setting his sights on broad themes and ideas about Men and Women that he just can’t pull off. The Seeding, like the pit in which it’s set, just isn’t that deep.

Watch The Seeding