Having cut his teeth on many music videos, as well as a documentary about a celebrated photographer (Mick Rock), writer-director Barnaby Clay has now helmed his first narrative feature, and it's a wild and interesting ride. It's also far from essential viewing, but if I only ever viewed and reviewed movies that I considered essential viewing then I'd be giving myself a very small "watchlist" indeed.
Scott Haze plays a man named Wyndham Stone who soon finds himself a bit lost and helpless in a deserted and isolated environment. He meets a young boy, but that child is no help, instead preferring to tease him and run away, and then eventually wanders into a canyon that contains the home of Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil). Alina might be able to help him, but there are more children in the surrounding area, and they will just as happily taunt two adults as one.
This is an enjoyable riff on the standard "evil kids" sub-genre, with just a couple of twists to the material being enough to make it feel a step removed from the main reference points (anything with killer kids, basically, but Children Of The Corn is the obvious one). Clay makes good use of the harsh and isolated environment, and helps himself even more by keeping the cast small.
Haze is very good as the bemused wanderer who finds himself in a situation that just keeps getting weirder and more dangerous. Sheil is just as capable, portraying her character as quiet and mysterious without throwing in too many distracting tics and grimaces. The children feel like one dangerous mass, but I'll namecheck both Alex Montaldo and Charlie Avink for their good work.
I might have been a bit dense here, and sometimes all manner of small contributing factors can affect how receptive you are to a movie, but the only main complaint I would have about The Seeding is a lack of any real depth. There's certainly something to be said about the drive and responsibilities of any parental figure, but Clay is happy enough to have his film set within a bit of a vacuum. It's a twisted fairytale, one in which the adults are endangered while the children are setting up the morality and rules.
There's a lot of promise shown in this, there's nothing onscreen that I would consider weak, but I really hope that whatever Clay decides to do next has a bit more meat on the bones, as it were. While it's admirable that he tends to avoid jump scares and obvious attempts to thicken the atmosphere, that approach tends to require something more substantial for viewers to consider and dissect. All we really end up being reminded of here is that the kids aren't alright. And we've known that for a long time already.
6/10
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