Writer-director Barnaby Clay, a longtime maker of documentaries and music videos, takes an artistic left turn into horror terrain with his feature narrative debut, The Seeding. The film finds Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze), after hiking through the desert and becoming lost, stumbling upon a house at the bottom of a large canyon hole occupied by the mysterious Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil). Naturally, things don’t go well for Wyndham once it’s clear that he’s trapped in the canyon and becomes the target of the desert inhabitants’ sadistic tricks and the nebulous motives of Alina herself, who keeps a strange relationship with the locals.
The film’s basic setup immediately recalls Woman in the Dunes, but Clay’s homages don’t end with the Teshigahara Hiroshi classic. With Wyndham being terrorized by malevolent hillbillies (shades of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and these tormenters’ vaguely Satanic rituals over a character’s unborn child evoking Rosemary’s Baby, Clay’s seeming devotion to honor other films takes The Seeding’s narrative into increasingly wayward directions. Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.
Also owing to this feeling of an unfocused story is that no dramatically consistent subtext is uncovered, with Clay touching on a myriad of would-be metaphors without ever effectively developing them beyond mere suggestion. In brief moments showing Wyndham’s effort to live in the canyon that delineate man’s futility in taming nature, or the character’s failure to appeal to the locals across scenes that limn, Deliverance-like, the discrepancy between different classes and cultures, Clay’s attempts to cover many bases results in subtextual whiplash.
Since Clay essentially never commits to picking a lane, some of his provocative ideas are left in the dust. Perhaps the most unfortunate case is the notion that Wyndham’s entrapment is no worse than the stasis of routine daily life and domesticity in the real world, which is broached only when Alina challenges Wyndham’s mention of yearning for a taste of freedom.
Despite its lack of narrative satisfaction, the film isn’t without arresting images. Clay has a knack for framing Wyndham as a small figure against the looming canyon walls in wide shots, eerily conveying the man’s profound feelings of entrapment. And in spite of being the film’s lone and unnecessary detour into outright surrealist horror, a shot depicting a gash on Wyndham’s leg slowly opening to reveal a demonic eye underneath nonetheless is spine-chilling.
That latter image in particular proves to be effective precisely because, in a film that’s so limited by its referentiality, it’s one of the few moments charged with originality. Indeed, The Seeding’s scare tactics ultimately scare less than they remind us of other better and, yes, scarier films.
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