Seeds is a prime example of how expectations can undermine how we experience a film. Making its world premiere here at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival, the outline on the film’s official TIFF page describes it as a “tense thriller” with tags like “mystery+thriller” and “horror”. Further piquing my interest are buzz phrases like “creepy”, “a shadowy figure”, and “bloody and intelligent thriller”. Complete the package with a badass hero image depicting actor, writer and director Kaniehtiio Horn aiming to fire a shotgun, and this is a film painted in my mind as a potential thriller gem.

Admittedly, the scene in the film that this hero image is captured from certainly is a badass moment for Horn’s lead character, Ziggy. But it’s also likely the best moment of an otherwise disappointing and underwhelming film. In attempting to juggle the trifecta of writing, acting, and directing a feature film, Horn ultimately falls short on all three fronts in Seeds, offering audiences an underdeveloped story, clumsy script, and a lead performance that leaves much to be desired.

Ziggy is an influencer who has just struck her first major sponsorship deal with a major company: a seed fertilization company called Nature’s Oath. At the same time, she’s called back to her community on a reservation to house sit for her aunt. Though she’s reluctant to gamble her new opportunity on spotty reservation internet, she journeys home anyway, arriving to warnings about this company she is now collaborating with and that “creepy things” happening around the house. These warnings, as you might guess, manifest into real threats as Ziggy’s sponsorship and the strange happenings all converge on one thing: an interest in a cache of ancestral seeds.

On paper, the ideas are compelling and the concept makes for a helluva pitch, but the film falls too far into unintentionally campy territory. Dialog is often unnatural, thus affecting the quality of the performances. Seeds also struggles to find its tone and stick to it; the film can spend long stretches of its runtime feeling like a made-for-TV family drama, making the horror and thriller elements feel out of place and awkward when those scenes happen. And the forces seeking to do evil turn out to not only be less than menacing, but almost laughable. 

What we’re given with Seeds leads me to think that Horn may have served her feature directing work better if she had more experience directing short films. Seeds, after all, comes off as a short film stretched and abused into a feature length film whose weaknesses - the campiness, the acting skill level, the contrived story - could’ve been used as strengths in the project of smaller scale. 

I imagine (and sincerely hope) that Seeds was a fun film to make. It’s a project whose amateur nature might be more acceptable and excusable in other arenas - local arthouse theaters, cultural festivals, and niche streaming platforms for example. In other words, this is a film that has heart. Just don’t expect it to be a pulse-pounding thriller.

Acting/Casting - 0 | Visual Effects and Editing - 1 | Story and Message - 0 | Entertainment Value - 1 | Music Score and Soundtrack - 0 | Reviewer’s Preference - 0 | What does this mean?