Shudder Saturday: The Seeding (2024)

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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She Dies Tomorrow (2020)

A film that would make up a perfect companion piece to the excellent Pontypool, She Dies Tomorrow is a film all about an infectious idea that renders people quite unable to go about their day to day business as they used to.

Kate Lyn Sheil plays Amy, a woman who becomes convinced that she is going to die tomorrow. She doesn't seem alarmed by that knowledge. It won't necessarily be a terrible thing, especially if she can put her plan in place to have her remains turned into a leather jacket. As Amy passes her foresight along to Jane (Jane Adams), Jane becomes equally convinced that she will also die tomorrow. As does everyone who becomes a part of this chain of communication.

Written and directed by Amy Seimetz, this is a small and effective drama that constantly darts in and out of the horror genre, and it's a film that explores a few various aspects of humanity in surprisingly effective ways, be it depression that can plunge anyone into a dark abyss, leaving them falling/floating like Alice heading into Wonderland, or the general aversion that most of us have when it comes to discussing our own mortality. It also features moments in which people are having a very real existential crisis, at the very least, while others try to criticise them for it or ask them to stop bringing down the mood of the room.

Sheil and Adams are both very good, spending a lot of the film in a bit of a daze, while everyone else appearing alongside them does work on a par with them, many quickly transforming during scenes that show them talking to a character until they themselves are afflicted with the same knowledge about their own time left on the planet. The supporting cast members worth highlighting are Katie Aselton, Chris Messina, Tunde Adebimpe, Jennifer Kim, and Josh Lucas, although you also have screentime for Adam Wingard, Michelle Rodriguez, and a number of others who are all poised to have their frame of mind radically altered.

This may not maintain any sense of creeping dread that appears in a few main scenes, and it may lack some real chills and scares, but it's an interesting film, thanks mainly to the main idea showing the reactions from various people seemingly forced to face their own mortality. If you go into it knowing what to expect, it's something aiming more for an atmosphere of helplessness and confusion rather than pure horror, then you should be able to appreciate everything that it does well, as opposed to watching it with any preconceptions that lead to you criticising it for what it's not trying to do.

Seimetz is best known for her acting work over the past couple of decades, but she's been doing some solid work behind the camera, in TV and film, for almost as long as she's been in front of the camera. And I hope she continues to make interesting choices like this.

7/10

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The Sacrament (2013)

Ti West may well be the single most frustrating writer-director working in independent horror today. After making such a great impact with The House Of The Devil, he seems to have gone downhill with every subsequent release, constantly squandering his potential and making it increasingly hard to put his name forward as the shining light in horror that he could have been.

The Sacrament doesn't rectify the situation. It's done (when convenient) in a documentary style, but with opening credits to seemingly ensure, I guess, that the illusion is never once entirely believable. A. J. Bowen and Joe Swanberg are two young men reporting for Vice who tag along with a man named Patrick (Kentucker Audley) after hearing about the strange events concerning his sister, Caroline (Amy Seimetz). It turns out that she's cleaned up her life, after many problem years, and is living in an idyllic community overseen by a religious leader, Father (Gene Jones). Is paradise on Earth possible, or is everything not quite as it seems when the visitors start to look beyond the surface of this peaceful place?

Where to begin with my complaints about this movie? Well, I guess I could always start with what I actually liked about it. I thought Bowen was pretty damn good, as he so often is. Jones was alright, although not captivating enough to believe that so many people would flock to, and stay with, him. And Seimetz did well in her role. The general premise is a good one, with the first half playing out in a way that sets up a potentially brilliant back end. And there are individual scenes that are pretty bloody intense, such as the moment in which a desperate mother does what she thinks is best to protect her daughter from whatever might be in store for her.

The rest of the movie is either clumsy, lazy (which seems to be an unfortunate trait that West carries between each movie lately), or just ill-advised, at best. The opening credits are really the first warning sign that this is a director about to utilise a style he either clearly doesn't understand or doesn't want to bother with for the duration of the film. By the time we get to the second half, and the scenes during which the camerawork is clearly not being controlled by any of our main characters, then you just end up wondering what the whole point was. Well, that's if you can stop thinking about how unbelievable everything gets as the final third moves from drama into horror territory. Character motivations and actions make little sense, the tension dissipates just as it should be ratcheting up by degrees, and it eventually becomes a bit of a chore to get to the end credits.

There's also that problem with Jones, a problem I already mentioned above. He's good enough in his performance, but it's not the right performance for the role, one that is also sorely treated by a weak script. If this is a man who can gain numerous followers and rule over them in an idyllic commune then he must come across as someone who can sell veggie-burgers to vampires. Jones can't manage that. He never seems to have enough presence, or (worst of all) the courage of his convictions.

There's almost enough here to make me like this movie, that's the most frustrating thing about it. Once again, West has teased me with his potential before retreating into his comfort zone. And the worst thing is . . . . . . . I'll still hold out hope for his next movie. Just as I did for this one.

4/10

http://www.amazon.com/Sacrament-Blu-ray-Joe-Swanberg/dp/B00KGA87CW/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1412432986&sr=1-2&keywords=the+sacrament