\u201cThe Seeding,\u201d a bleak horror movie about a hiker who gets trapped in the desert, starts by making you flinch. We see extreme close-ups of a toddler\u2019s bloody face as it chows down on a human finger. The kid snacks on the digit for a moment, then the camera suddenly pulls back to show him stumbling around the desert.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shot in Utah, \u201cThe Seeding\u201d benefits greatly from its evocative location photography, credited to director of photography Robert Leitzell. The movie\u2019s eerie ambience also barely compensates for its creators\u2019 otherwise wispy approximation of psychosexual dread, which is often defined by generic folk horror atavism and a lot of unprocessed misanthropy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Writer\/director Barnaby Clay successfully keeps viewers on our toes, even if a lot of his movie feels like a series of programmatic jabs at our complacence. Clay\u2019s surreal drama isn\u2019t stillborn as much as it\u2019s emotionally uninflected and monotonous. Squirming emotions, about fatherhood and attendant feelings of inadequacy, are frequently produced, but not much is required of viewers, except to wince and repeat.<\/p>\n
The boy from the first scene is part of a tribe of grimy and gleefully sadistic children. This group isn\u2019t the main subject of \u201cThe Seeding.\u201d More like a crucial plot device and symbolic clothesline. Wayward hiker Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze) follows one of the boys against all genre-savvy common sense. He quickly gets lost and stumbles into a desolate canyon, populated by a single woman, Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil) and inaccessible beyond a retractable ladder and some rope.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Wyndham repeatedly injures himself while attempting to escape; Alina encourages him to be like her and accept his fate. He asks her questions, but she only says so much. The boys sometimes appear over the canyon\u2019s edge; they either curse Wyndham or give him false hope. He gives in to his unyielding partner, and slowly loses his mind in the process.<\/p>\n
In his second feature, Clay (\u201cShot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock\u201d) processes a mess of icky emotions with a sensibility that he mostly magpied away from other movies. Clay, in a director\u2019s statement, cites influences that range from \u201cenvironmental\/elemental thrillers,\u201d like \u201cDeliverance\u201d and \u201cPicnic at Hanging Rock,\u201d to \u201cpsychological horror\u201d movies like \u201cRosemary\u2019s Baby\u201d and \u201cThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those inspirations show, and so do a few others, as in a nightmarish sex scene that brings to mind the dreamy meltdowns of both David and Jennifer Lynch. \u201cThe Seeding\u201d is also divided into chapters named after the lunar cycle\u2014\u201cSturgeon Moon,\u201d \u201cHarvest Moon,\u201d \u201cCold Moon\u201d, etc.\u2014and illustrated by the inevitable rot of a basketful of perishables, including some unwashed carrots, a potato, and also a dead bird.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Clay\u2019s eagerness to displease shows a little too often, which makes it difficult to suspend one\u2019s disbelief during Wyndham and Alina\u2019s already patience-testing dialogue exchanges. She obviously doesn\u2019t exist just to serve his needs, and that\u2019s basically the root of the movie\u2019s paranoiac tension. She controls his fate and won\u2019t really say why; he doesn\u2019t like that.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe Seeding,\u201d a bleak horror movie about a hiker who gets trapped in the desert, starts by making you flinch. We see extreme close-ups of a toddler\u2019s bloody face as it chows down on a human finger. The kid snacks on the digit for a moment, then the camera suddenly pulls back to show him …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48,37],"class_list":["post-1322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-horror","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}