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written by Owen Long & Steven Weisman
directed by Owen Long
by Walter Chaw Owen Long’s Seeds aims for the bleachers, for which it should get some credit. It’s a navel-gazing exercise in which Marcus Milton (Trevor Long), an aging Aschenbach with very particular appetites, returns to the family reserve one eternal twilight to act as babysitter to niece Lily (Andrea Chen–disastrously uneven) and her little brother Spencer (Garr Long). There, he pops pills and sees tentacles the film presents as a metaphor for the repressed sexual dysfunction he nurses within what appears to be an Asian fetish, what with the hooker he kills in the prologue montage and now his niece, who does her level best to seduce dear Uncle. Where to begin? For starters, there are way too many “waking from a nightmare” stings in this thing; and then there’s that long seduction sequence in the middle where Chen tries to laugh on cue and ends up just demonstrating a different way to scowl. She’s so badly outmatched by Long that it has the same effect as Sofia Coppola’s performance in The Godfather III: namely, that everything gets fucked up because no one believes for a second that someone could be romantically interested in this construct. (Director Long does Chen no favours by letting this take through. Someone, at some point, should have said something.) In flashback, we see a young Lily bringing a shell with some mysterious tentacle creature inside it into the house, where, we presume, it’s been gestating in the basement. Jungians will identify that all of this is the product of someone who skimmed the texts. Milton believes that his sick impulses are growing inside him like the Elder God is growing in the boiler, escalating to a few final moments in which all that repression leads to an explosion of his unexamined Shadow projection. What I’m trying to say is that Seeds is that roommate you got freshman year who has a man-bun, rock climbs, and is majoring in Cosmology. Give it this: the cinematography of Rhode Island looks great, and if you’re going to fail, do it spectacularly.
