The Seed has an eye-catching thumbnail of an attractive woman with sunglasses on and black liquid flowing from her eyes. As a person perusing the choices on a streaming service, an image like this is meant to catch your eye. You might expect there to be an event that takes place during the film that is tied to this image, and you’d be right. However, the instance in which this image is realized during the movie is not until the final act. What takes place leading up to this moment is a meandering and middling effort to create a cosmic horror story using uninteresting and unlikeable characters.

Pros

Puppetry and animatronics look good
Makeup effects are decent
Only around 90 minutes

Cons

Plot is unexciting, drawn-out, and predictable
Characters are one-dimensional
Acting is inconsistent

Plot & Thoughts

Deidre (Lucy Martin), Heather (Sophie Vavasseur), and Charlotte (Chelsea Edge) all travel to a fancy villa in an isolated section of the Mojave desert. The mansion is owned by Heather’s father and the three of them are using the location to watch a meteor shower and do a photoshoot with Diedre, who is a model with many followers on social media. Diedre is addicted to her social media and constantly brings it up in conversation, being a rather vapid and self-absorbed individual. Heather is her cautious friend who is concerned about upsetting her father should something happen to the house, sometimes to a neurotic degree. Charlotte is the photographer of the group and is a bit of the odd duck of the bunch. She is a little socially unsure of herself and has the more compassionate personality of the three, especially when their new guest arrives.

On the night of the meteor shower, something crashes into their pool. They think it’s a meteorite at first, but quickly realize it’s some kind of creature that happens to smell incredibly bad. They assume it died from the impact, but the next morning it is no longer next to the pool. When a maintenance guy comes by, they try to get him to get rid of it, but he runs off when it starts to move. Despite it looking like a harmless creature that resembles a sloth mixed with a dog, the girls start to experience weird sensations, have strange dreams, and lose control of their actions the longer the thing sticks around.

I feel like I’ve given away details about the plot that occur later into the movie’s runtime than I normally would, but this film moves at such a slow pace, I wouldn’t really be able to summarize the plot enough to give you an idea as to whether or not you would want to see the film for yourself. My recommendation is that you shouldn’t—which should be obvious from the title and intro of this article—but I don’t want to just say the movie sucks without going into some details as to why.

For a movie that was only an hour and a half, it felt like there was an extra forty-five minutes to it. This is mainly because The Seed doesn’t have a plot that justifies a full-length runtime. All the various scenes of significance that occur could have been trimmed down. The scenes that happen in between could have been shortened or removed entirely. Had it been an episode of an anthology horror show with a limit to an hour or less, it would have been a lot better. The fact that it’s cosmic horror means it probably would have fit in as an episode of Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities—the overall quality is about the same, too. By the time someone starts bleeding black stuff from their eyes, I was already past the point of boredom and just wanted it to end. Even though the special effects were perfectly serviceable, having a bunch of gore at the end does not just pivot a person’s opinion who has been bored for the past sixty minutes.

The main issues I have are the fact that the characters, with whom we spend the entirety of the film, don’t do anything to make them interesting or likeable. Diedre is the common bitch. Heather is the nervous friend who doesn’t want things to get messy, and just complains or worries about her dad. Charlotte is a meek, bleeding-heart, animal lover whose empathy essentially dooms them all. Charlotte is the only one who really changes by the end of the movie, but it doesn’t make her any more engaging as a protagonist. When the horrific stuff finally started happening, I didn’t care what happened to any of them. The more time I spent with them, the more apparent it was how they all deserved what was coming to them, and that they were not smart or mentally strong enough to eliminate the alien threat.

TL;DR

The Seed is a movie that should have been an shortened into an episode of a horror anthology show. It has a plot that is stretched far too thin across a 90-minute film that managed to bore me and make me dislike the characters, because there wasn’t enough to them to make me want to be with them for the full runtime. If The Seed were condensed down into a 30-45 minute episode of the Cabinet of Curiosities show, it still wouldn’t have been good enough to make that show worth watching, but it would have been one of the less infuriating episodes and not felt so tedious to watch.

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