The Seed

Be Seeding You

The Seed
UK 2021
Directed by Sam Walker
Hardman Pictures

Warning: Some spoilerage occurs.

Okay, so this might be a short review because I’m really torn as to how I feel about The Seed, truth be told. This is definitely a modern day B-movie and it feels like something Norman J. Warren might have directed back in the 1970s, in that it’s low budget and contained in a very small set of environments and with a very small cast (six in total, although it’s only the three leads acting alongside a special effect for the most part). It wears a few influences on its sleeve and so the film feels a little like an amalgam of movies the director may (or may not) have seen and been swayed by at some point, it has to be said.

And usually that’s enough to get me hooked and on board with a movie. After all, it’s nicely lensed with some bright colours and some nice use of vertical and horizontal architectural details, used to split the frame up into nice compositions, for some of the scenes. But it just wasn’t enough to pull it up and make it a great movie I could recommend to my friends. I think one of the reasons for this is because the film may be too reminiscent of the plots and budgets of a bygone era of cheap horror cinema but, it’s shot from a very contemporary viewpoint and so any nostalgia value, which is part and parcel of what makes those movies great to watch now, is not in evidence. Of course, if I was watching this thirty years from now and picking up on the ‘classic 2020s feel of the film’, I’d probably fall in love with this one but, yeah, something just feels off about it. Another reason I had trouble with this is because of the three lead protagonist/antagonists in the film, played by Lucy Martin, Chelsea Edge and Sophie Vavasseur... who were mostly unlikeable.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the actresses, they’re all fine. It’s more about the characters and how they’re written. The film takes place in the Mojave desert and as it sets us up with shots of the exteriors and interiors of the house before any humans are even seen, we can hear the girls in voice over on the soundtrack long before we see them, as various static shots of the house which plays host to 95% of the movie are set up to give the audience some idea of the layout (it’s actually a little like the house which features in Revenge, which I reviewed here). The three girls are staying at one of their father’s luxury houses in the middle of nowhere, to have a break from city life and watch a meteor shower which is due to fall from the sky that night. The trouble is, they’re all pretty much airheads in terms of the way their characters are written and it’s like each one is just a little more stupid than the next.

Also, one of them who is a model, has a vlog so she’s constantly recording on her phone (until the ‘meteor shower’ knocks out all the cell phones) and it’s pretty much a thinly disguised plot element to fill the audience in on what’s happening and shorthand the dynamics of the characters. But they did not have my sympathy throughout the film and, when a little Gamera-looking alien turns up and they try to get rid of it before, eventually, in the case of two of the girls, it takes over their minds and violates their bodies... I honestly didn’t care whether this little alien succeeded in putting stage one of his world conquering plans into action or not.

The film starts to get vaguely sexual in a modern Hollywood way, in terms of not actually showing much flesh while almost harkening back, stylistically, to something like The Man Who Fell To Earth in these particular sequences, where something that looks like a mixture of red intestines and canvass merges and covers the girls in a writhy, sexual way, impregnating them with... yeah, you guessed it... ‘its seed’, with lots of little embryos waiting to burst forth after a very short labour. It feels quite surreal in these sections (and, talking of the surreal, when the creature is swaddled in clothes, it certainly recalls the baby from Eraserhead and, I would guess that’s quite deliberate) and, it’s competently done but, yeah, the film seems a little like a one trick pony and, after a while and one hallucinatory (in the aliens’ sex head space) dream sequence too far... it’s just a little repetitive by a point in the movie where I couldn’t care less if any of the human characters lived or died in this.

So, yeah, I was unimpressed with the film as something either surprising or at least engaging on a story level... but I was impressed with how the whole thing had been put together and, although it’s obviously low budget, The Seed doesn’t ever really look cheap and it certainly puts its ideas up on the screen in an easily translatable and competent manner. Looking at the IMDB, I discovered that this is the writer/director’s first feature length movie and, honestly, this shows a huge amount of potential and I believe, if this guy is allowed to make more movies, he’ll find his voice and really start delivering a notable body of work. It just doesn’t feel like he’s quite there yet and, I just hope this film doesn’t do badly and that he gets to work on some more stuff. For all its post-modernistic referencing, it does feel like its trying to be somewhat original in its direction, even if it doesn’t always get there. So yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing some more of this director’s work in the future.

So, that’s me very done with The Seed but I would maybe urge people to take a look at it, especially those who aren’t usually watching sci-fi/horror genre crossovers because, I suspect, those less initiated into the various tropes may get a lot more out of it than those more accustomed to the genre. The film certainly wasn’t dull, though and, yeah, some people will probably like this one a lot more than I did, for sure.