Review: Seeds

Metaphor is a powerful and often necessary device in horror cinema, and can range greatly in importance between films. Where The Babadook, for instance, relies on metaphor to give its monster purpose, something like A Nightmare on Elm Street goes for a more literal interpretation of its subject and allows the metaphor to color in the empty spaces. Seeds, from first time director Owen Long, is a lot like the former but without the subtlety and thrills that turned Jennifer Kent into a horror industry sensation.

Marcus (Trevor Long) is a well off man whose inner demons are slowly eating at him and, being the kind of guy who drives sexy vintage cars while moping around, he takes a vacation to his family home to sort himself out. While there, Marcus’s brother drops off the kids so that he can sort out some problems with his wife. Unfortunately, one of the two kiddos is Lily (Andrea Chen), whom Marcus has been infatuated with for years and might just be a major catalyst for his mental anguish. Also there’s a monster and stuff.

Where Seeds works, it does so with aplomb. It’s a visually striking film, and director of photography Eun-ah Lee obviously knows what he’s doing. Rarely are scenes so arresting that they catch you off guard, but nothing is ever ugly or cheap looking. At worst, it just feels a little derivative of better films, like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.

Similarly, the lead performance from supporting character actor Trevor Long is serviceable. He never quite fits the shoes of a leading man, but his understated performance mostly works. With a little more work in the script department and some more assured direction, he might have made the leap.

The script and direction are undoubtedly the weak points. Long’s story, scripted by Steven Weisman, is one of those artsy horror films that seems a little ashamed of being a horror flick and wants so badly to be a subtle allegory about sexual abuse. That’s a tough topic to play with, and Seeds’ screenplay just doesn’t cut it. The elements are there, but some tweaking to give it a life of its own and to let the metaphors mature and take shape would have been appreciated.

Getting back to the acting, another big downfall is Andrea Chen, who shows signs of capability but is just handed too much to work with. To be fair, few young actors could deal with some of this on-the-nose portentous dialogue. Add in the creep factor from Marcus and many of her scenes are often uncomfortable to the point of being distracting, and later handling of their relationship feels clumsy and even a little implausible.

Of course, you’re probably wondering about the monster. After all, it is prominently displayed in the promotional art, so that’s only reasonable. It’s… very good, but hardly a major player in the proceedings. Long has made the unfortunate decision to rely primarily on character drama, and it’s just not up to par, especially when there’s a totally rad Lovecraftian creature on the sidelines.

I don’t think going all out gorefest would have helped, but crafting a more physical beast with hard rules and nightmarish visuals would have helped quite a bit. There are hints of a better film, and we get plenty of Marcus grabbing his head and dealing with some basic body horror, but its not enough. Metaphor is nice, but grounding it in harsh reality is nicer.

Seeds is an intriguing debut, but its disinterest in pushing itself beyond simplistic metaphors about a very challenging subject stops it from greatness. I’m optimistic about whatever Owen Long does next, but this one is only a fairly slight recommend for those who enjoy short, pretty experiments.