Sitting in the subgenre of folk horror, 2023's The Seeding is a barren, intense film that puts its protagonist through the wringer. Here on the Arrow Video Player is a VOD release of the film.

The Seeding is the first full-length film from Barnaby Clay, who wrote/directed it. Before this, he had fifteen credits, taking in music videos & shorts

It sits in the legacy of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other Southern Gothic movies. However, the decay and brutalism found in those films are inverted as The Seeding shifts the horror to the Western United States, emphasising a wholly natural yet barren world. Alongside rural slashers, the influence of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 1964 avant-garde thriller Woman of the Dunes is also evident in its concept, but The Seeding forges a repulsive path of its own.

Hints of the grotesque continually emerge throughout a story that follows a hapless man who unexpectedly finds himself in an unfamiliar and unforgiving new world.

Photographer Wyndham Stone (Scott Haze) becomes lost in the desert and unwisely takes a rope ladder into an enclosed canyon with a single cabin. When the ladder disappears, he finds himself trapped and reliant on the lone woman who lives in the cabin, the quiet Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil). She lives off-grid, wholly removed from modern life, and seemingly taunted by a pack of sadistic boys who patrol the edge of the canyon and have their sights fixed on new prisoner Stone. 

As time goes on, Stone’s attempts to escape continually fail, and he becomes more accustomed to his new and strange life.  With no chance of rescue, and the time stretching through the seasons, his relationship with Alina develops in unexpected ways.

The Seeding makes excellent use of its Utah landscape, particularly the big bowl that becomes an enclosed Hell for Stone. The impressive locale—realised as an enclosed bowl in post-production—is a character in its own right. Everything else hinges on the performances from Haze and Sheil trapped inside, and the broad characters of the kids, of various ages, circling the rim like vultures.

Director Barnaby Clay conjures up an eerie atmosphere in a film that slowly creeps and crawls its way to carving its own deep folklore. The arid landscape and claustrophobic rock bowl, intercut with revolting shots of cell division and multiplication and natural decay in microscopic close-up. It’s utterly organic horror, backed by screeching chords, and it repulsively and relentlessly evokes the circle of life as Stone passes through the stages of grief.

Haze commits to that journey as Stone. It's an unsettling experience to watch him run through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance as the phases of the moon change. Clay makes sure we feel that pain and realisation on the way—one horrible escape attempt sees Stone smash against the bowl’s rock face, leaving a deep red stain.

But opposite Haze, Sheil’s Alina is the quietly powerful core. Both a quiet victim of circumstance and a resilient force of nature, it’s the shocking and unexpected levels of hidden depth she reveals on the way to the Harvest Moon that will stay with viewers.