The Seed (Movie Review)

The Seed is writer/director Sam Walker’s first feature-length film, and while there are some bright spots, there are also spots best described as strange and at times nonsensical.  Three young women, Deirdre (Lucy Martin), Heather (Sophie Vavasseur), and Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) head to Heather’s father’s vacation home in the Mojave Desert to watch a meteor shower, mostly for likes and follows on social media.  While there, they encounter an alien being, and the situation starts to deteriorate from there, as the alien begins to influence the women and control their behavior.

Heather is primarily concerned with getting rid of the “armadillo thing” before it causes damage to the property and gets her into trouble.  Charlotte wants to care for it.  And Deirdre, the most sociopathic of the three, wants to kill it immediately.  From there, the film is at times hilarious, gross, greatly oversexualized, and, at times, tedious and illogical.  The film’s end is frustratingly predictable.

The acting is solid enough, given what the actors have to work with.  It’s interesting to note that none of them are American, but their accents are convincing enough to have fooled me.  The depiction of life in the Mojave Desert, where I lived for a time, did not fool me for an instant (it was filmed in Malta).

There are moments in the film where it seems to be posing questions—about friendship, motherhood, responsibility, the importance of sticking together in challenging times—but it could have followed up on these in a more meaningful way.  The friendship between the girls at times doesn’t make sense; they rarely seem to like each other much.  This makes it harder to sympathize when tough decisions about what must be done with those who were corrupted by the alien at the end of the film.

The film’s Candyland color scheme suited the film at first on the women’s whimsical journey to a veritable mansion in the middle of nowhere in a quest for social media street cred, but later, the David Lynch-like psychedelics and alien orgies feel jarring and out of place.  This seemed intentional to me, though, as it successfully unsettled me more and more as the film progressed.'

The Seed debuts on Shudder on Thursday, March 10.