The Seeding

The film benefits from debut feature director Barnaby Clay’s desire to transfix us with his artfully detailed redneck-biblical landscape.

The atmosphere is spectacular, and the disturbing moments are not missed, but it failed, definitively, at the end of its cook time. [Full review in Spanish]

Clay’s surreal drama isn’t stillborn as much as it’s emotionally uninflected and monotonous.

Clay’s eye for composition and Sheil’s beguiling performance are highlights in an arthouse horror story that plays it too safe with the horror. One that's far more shallow than its central chasm setting suggests.

Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.

Ultimately, there's just not enough here to praise, on either an emotional or narrative level, but like some deserts, the film is nice to look at. It's just a place no one would be advised to go, much less stay.

The Seeding is a terrifying primal scream across scorched earth and one of the year’s most confident debuts.

Clay’s fusing of claustrophobic estrangement, grisly carnage and Freudian oedipal complexes offers a disturbing allegory about parenthood and the harsh realities of survival.

The Seeding is a haunting work of folk horror that is well-cultivated and nurtured to the bitter, inevitable end.

An atmospheric riff on "The Woman in the Dunes" that unfortunately never amounts to much beyond its psychosexual survival-horror shocks.