Seeds is a 2019 thriller about a man who retreats to his family home along the New England coast, finding it haunted by his darkest fears and deepest desires.
Sex, drugs and very bad things are on the menu for Marcus Milton (Trevor Long) as he begins a night in a hotel with a beautiful naked and masked young woman, the scene surely the start of something devilishly fun. However, it ends in a nightmare, something strange and unearthly hinted at as Marcus desperately calls in for help to fix the ‘accident’. He flees to his hometown, a pastoral coastal home to recollect, his brother Michael (Chris McGarry) nearby, happy to have him around as his marriage to Grace (Michelle Liu Coughlin) is crumbling, their children, young Spencer (Garr Long) and teenager Lily (Andrea Chen) soon under Marcus’ care. But he is not as he seems, a demon nested in his soul, leaving him with impure thoughts about his niece and a slithering creature in the shadows lurking over his every move.
You can see where this is going, director Owen Long, who co-wrote the screenplay with Steven Weisman, walking a very thin line, the story entirely weighted on some rather troubling impulses by a man who understands exactly what they are and why they are bad but struggling with the boundaries that keep them at bay. It’s compounded by his close contact with a girl who is discovering her own emerging sexual desires, unaware of the monster her unintentionally alluring behaviors are inciting within him.
This leaves Seeds in a precarious position, one a few movies in similar fashion have found themselves before, where a young girl holds great power over an older man, and the consequences of such. We learn that Marcus isn’t just now feeling this need for Lily, moments of her even younger seemingly being watched from afar the apparent birth of a spindly beast that has found home in the dark corners of her uncle’s mind. It’s not helped when she now (seemingly) finds herself drawn to the quite, outwardly protective and harmless older man, tempting him into a snare that he cannot escape.
As is perhaps necessary, Seeds places Lily in a decidedly sexualized light, though Long is very careful never to tread into exploitation. The way she sleeps, when she baths, how she speaks; these are all triggers for Marcus, and the camera swoons over her with a disquieting attraction while soaked in troubling creepiness. You begin to wonder what is real and what lives in the man’s painfully shattered mind as he is slowly swallowed into a ravenous abyss. In all this is Spencer, an innocent little brother who senses something isn’t right.
While it might be marketed as such, Seeds isn’t much of a conventional horror movie, much how The Babadook wasn’t a traditional monster in the dark movie either. The message is not quite as ambiguous as that film made itself, but nor should it be. This is a disturbing depiction of inappropriate sexual craving, and does so without the typical silly jumpscares and obvious scary movie standards, allowing this exploration to be far more unsettling for a whole different kind of horror. This is a movie that many might dismiss – at first glance – as being another run-of-the-mill slasher, one more in an endless conveyor belt of cheap gore crowding digital shelves. It is not. It’s nothing of the sort. Seeds is instead an uncommon character study that asks some hard questions. It has its flaws of course, but this is unexpected and a welcome detour off the well-worn tracks, a devastatingly emotional and harrowing journey into crippling oblivion.