THE SEEDING - Mark Reviews Movies

The Seeding, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 25, 2024

The intended allegory of The Seeding overtakes the basics of writer/director Barnaby Clay's narrative. Honestly, it's not as if the central metaphor here holds up under much scrutiny, either.

The story is a fairly simple and, at first at least, familiar one. A man named Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze)—if that actually could be a real name—is out in the desert, photographing an eclipse for his job at some nature-focused organization (He must not have an important role or be too memorable an employee, considering that nobody seems to make any effort to find him over the significant amount of time he'd be absent from work and his regular life).

While hiking the rocky terrain, the guy comes across a boy, who is maybe just into a double-digit age and claims to have lost his parents. In one of those moves that only people who must be subconsciously eager to participate in a horror story seem to make, Wyndham decides to follow the kid, who insists his missing parents are in the opposite direction of the guy's car.

Ignore the obvious questions—such as how the boy would be so certain of the general area where his parents would be if they're lost and why the kid ignores the stranger's sound advice about walking to where there's a cellphone signal—one might have about this situation. Wyndham does, until the child runs off on his own after giving him a creepy little smirk.

By then, it's too late for the guy, of course, because now Wyndham himself is properly lost in the desert—with no way to contact help, no sense of direction or sight of any landmarks, no food or water, and no shelter from the incoming nighttime chill. By pure luck or maybe by some design (which just raises even more questions—of which there already are and will be plenty—about the mechanics of the villains here), Wyndham finds a cabin located at the bottom of a pit. There's handy ladder to reach the bottom, but in the morning, the lowest-most section of the ladder is gone. Now, he's lost and trapped.

Those are the basics of the plot, which amounts to Wyndham trying to find a way to leave the pit. The more specific concerns of Clay's story, though, have to do with who's in the pit with this guy and the group of other kids of various ages who presumably live in the area surrounding it. In the cabin is Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil), a woman who seems fairly content for having spent a lot of time in this place. In fact, it becomes clear that she has no experience with or concept of the world beyond the pit, so yes, this is probably going to become the extent of Wyndham's life for the foreseeable future.

If one can accept all of the contrivances and vaguely weird back story that result in Wyndham's imprisoned circumstances, the core idea of this tale is a bit unsettling. Since little of what we see and even less of what's broadly suggested about this isolated society in the desert make much sense, the instinct, though, is to grasp for some other meaning to this story than what's on its face.

Clay makes sure to load a lot those ideas into this, such as a conversation between Wyndham and Alina about how he only wants freedom and she counters that his very concept of what it means to be free seems about as limited as his present situation. It's kind of convenient how Alina is either quietly sheltered in both mind and manner or decidedly smart and cunning, depending entirely on what's required to keep Wyndham in stasis and on the point Clay wants to make. The same almost goes for the kids who live above, making sure the two adults have enough to survive, even though it's confounding how any of them manage to do so.

Again, it's primarily allegorical, apparently, having to do with Wyndham facing the kind of responsibility his life has avoided, lest it turn out to be a figurative prison akin to the one in which he's currently stuck. He and Alina fight, make up, fight some more, start a little home together, and reveal the concept to which the title is referring. The third act is a mess of contradictory ideas, especially when it comes to what lesson—if any—Wyndham is meant to learn and why the dolt is so keen on yelling his secret plans when his co-conspirator can be heard in a normal register. In terms of it functioning as a fable and a thriller, The Seeding collapses under minimal thought.

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