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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Shudder Saturday: What Josiah Saw (2021)

An enjoyably dark slice of Southern gothic, What Josiah Saw is a well-acted and nicely constructed piece of work that leaves you with a lot to mull over by the time the end credits roll. It may be telling that I almost forgot to tag this review with the word "horror", and there's certainly a number of elements that allow it to sit comfortably within that genre, but I'm not being negative about it when I say that it's full of moments of heavy drama.

Robert Patrick is Josiah Graham, the patriarch of a family that we soon see as being deeply troubled. Whether or not that trouble is caused by Josiah himself is hard to say, but it certainly seems that way. Josiah stays at home with one son, Thomas (Scott Haze). His other son (Eli, played by Nick Stahl) has got himself in some trouble, giving him a criminal record and a bad debt that hangs over him. He has a chance to put things right, but it may come at a terrible cost. Then there's Mary (Kelli Garner), a young woman desperate to have a baby with her partner, Ross (Tony Hale). Mary had a procedure to make her sterile when she was a younger woman, but now is desperate to adopt and have her own family. A financial offer made for the family home leads to Eli and Mary heading back there, reluctantly. Maybe this can mean a fresh start. If they can all escape the past.

Written by Robert Alan Dilts,  his feature debut no less, this seems to be a natural progression from the 2009 short, Eliki, that he also worked on with director Vincent Grashaw, also making his feature debut here. Having not seen that film, unfortunately, I don't know if this is a full expansion of that or if it is just connected by the collaborative work of Dilts and Grashaw. Whatever the level of progression, it's clear that both men work very well together. Within both the script and the direction, patience is key. The pacing allows for some impressive moments dotted throughout each main sequence (the structure basically provides a main chapter for each of the three Graham children), and there's a satisfying, if disturbing, ending that answers all of your questions, albeit in a way that may seem open to interpretation to many viewers.

Grashaw helms himself immensely by assembling a superb cast. Patrick may not be in too many scenes, when you add up the runtime, but his presence casts an impressive shadow over everything. That's what his character does, but it helps that Patrick himself can add his unnerving presence to it. Stahl is also excellent here, although I don't want to accidentally insult him by calling him a great fit for his role. It's true though, and he has that perfect mix of desperation, the desire to please those above him in the pecking order, and a strong core of self-preservation. Garner is equally good, and her character is equally troubled in ways different from her brothers. I would say that Haze is the weakest of the bunch, but his performance isn't actually bad. It's just the way he has to play things in the third act, hampered by a script that forces him into a position that feels much more generic than anything seen in the rest of the movie. Hale does well in his supporting role, and there are a couple of scenes that make good use of Jake Weber, but the focus always moves back to the members of the Graham family, ensuring that it's Patrick, Stahl, Garner, or Haze who carry the majority of the scenes.

I don't want to spoil anything for viewers going into this blind, but it's worth warning people that the heart of What Josiah Saw contains subject matter that could upset some viewers. I wouldn't normally mention this, not when it comes to horror content in a horror movie, but the fact that this so often feels like a straightforward drama gives everything a bit more of an impact. It's a film that spends a lot of time delivering light punches, and then winding up to deliver some absolute hammer blows in the third act. You may be left reeling by the end of things, but you should also begrudgingly admire such a skilled and confident display of strength.

8/10

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