Being a social media influencer isn’t the most respected career path. Many people criticize influencer’s attention-thirsty behavior as being bad attempts to make a buck. Those people might end up having an especially good time watching Sam Walker’s The Seed, which not only satirizes the influencer culture, but mutilates it.
Deidre (Lucy Martin) has become internet famous for little more than being attractive, and she fits that archetype exactly. Preoccupied with her appearance and what her next “Insta-worthy” story will be, she decides to have a girl’s weekend in the Mojave Desert for a sexy photo shoot during a rare meteor shower that’s about to happen. Accompanying her are the only semi-shallow rich girl Heather (Sophie Vavasseur), who volunteered her father’s house for them to stay at while he’s gone, and the more down-to-earth Charlotte (Chelsea Edge), who clearly needs to learn to choose better friends. The weekend loses its sexiness when their phones stop working during the meteor shower and something crash lands in their pool. At first, they think it’s a space rock, but they soon realize it’s alive. Through a series of strange revelations, they learn that they’ve stumbled upon an alien being, and it’s a major buzzkill for their “weekend vibes,” to say the least.
For those who revel in schadenfreude, there’s something strangely satisfying about seeing hugely unlikeable, vapid characters put through a grotesque body horror gauntlet in The Seed. Deidre and Heather want nothing more than to look cute in their cutoff denim shorts, and by the time the film unravels, there’s nothing cute about their predicament. While it leans toward satire on many occasions, the humor only sometimes lands, often stemming from the sheer absurdity of the situation rather than the intended jokes written in the dialogue. The influencer clichés grow stale by the first scene in the film, so the best the audience gets is seeing these mostly awful, two-dimensional characters under duress. Even the more redeemable Charlotte isn’t enjoyable enough to care much about when their intergalactic intruder becomes menacing.
The most interesting aspect of The Seed is its practical effects. The alien they discover is something akin to Lynch’s Eraserhead baby, and its slimy-skinned body is disgusting to behold. While the well-crafted puppet doesn’t look particularly frightening (and sometimes even has an “ugly cute” quality about it), the threat it poses becomes very real when the film leans into the body horror more heavily. A few phantasmagoric alien abduction sequences suggest the creature is far more than what it seems, with a bloody, undulating, tendril-covered mass engulfing the ladies in shots that bear some resemblance to 1989’s Society. By the climax, the mostly slow-paced, gore-free film escalates rapidly, and it becomes a bloodbath with some seriously stomach-churning mutilations that remind viewers it’s supposed to be a horror film.
Despite some decent effects and an amusing premise, there isn’t much else to hold the campy film together. The plot is predictable, the protagonists are disinteresting, and very little happens to move the story forward enough to fill the running time. This is writer/director Sam Walker’s first full-length feature, and unfortunately, it shows. While The Seed works in some regards, there’s nothing here that horror fans haven’t seen that hasn’t already been done, but better.
—Andrea Riley
