Writer/director Barnaby Clay’s feature debut opens with a peculiar pairing of scenes that set the tone for what is to come. In the first a toddler, naked but for his nappy and absolutely filthy, walks in the desert chewing on a piece of meat that gradually comes into focus as a severed human finger. In the second, a car, shot wide from above, drives along a dusty road until stopping and parking at its conspicuously tapered end – and the high angle of the shot makes it clear that this desert track comes with the distinctive shape of a spermatozoon. Indeed, in keeping with its title, The Seeding is concerned with the cycles and rituals of life’s procreative processes – in a barren landscape full of feral boys.

The driver of the car (Scott Haze) – whose name we well later learn is Wyndham Alan Stone – is in this arid canyon to capture a solar eclipse on his high-end camera. After running into a strange young boy (Charlie Avink) who claims to be lost, Stone himself gets turned around and dehydrated. Lured in the night by the sound – and then sight – of a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil), unnamed in the film but listed in the closing credits as Alina, who is singing to herself by her cabin in a rocky clearing below, Stone climbs a ladder down the cliff face to ask her for help, collapses in exhaustion, and wakes the next morning to discover that the ladder is gone, and there is no way for either Alina or him to escape the sheer walls of this hole – and when Stone tries to scale the cliff, a rowdy gang of young men above makes him lose his balance and injure his leg in the subsequent fall. Now, like the wounded bird that Alina keeps in a cage until it may heal, Stone is trapped.

“It’s kind of a microcosm down here,” Stone will later say of the rocky prison that he shares with Alina, “A smaller world existing within a much larger one.” Sure enough, as he negotiates his relationship with the taciturn Alina and learns how to survive within the narrow confines of his new home way off-grid, he must also contemplate big questions about what it is that he truly wants and values in his existence, what freedom actually means, and whether there is more to life beyond our basic biological function and the Darwinian demands of survival. For this little universe contains everything that a person needs: food, clothing, shelter, love, family, even ground fertile enough to seed new life. As time passes, this man who takes pride in his autonomy and independence starts ever so slowly, over many moons, to reconcile himself to being tied down to someone else, and giving himself over to the next generation.

The Seeding opens with an eclipse – a heavenly event in which the paths of sun and moon, often figured in myth as masculine and feminine, intersect to bring an ominous darkness before the light can return and life can be renewed. While the film itself is full of searing desert sunlight, its narrative is measured (in formal chapter headings) by the passages of the moon, recalibrating Stone’s time inside this cavernous feminine space (its walls graffitied with illustrations of a snake-like woman refreshing herself by sloughing off her skin) in accordance with a distinctly menstrual cycle. For in this microcosmic zone, the movements of individual and astronomical bodies collapse into one, even as, further confounding the cellular and the celestial, there are occasional cuts to abstract graphic representations of phenomena that might be occurring at either a molecular or a galactic level. As above, so below…

This updated reimagining of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman of the Dunes (1964) cruelly allegorises entrapment and emancipation (of sorts), reducing the human condition to its most essential elements. Cinematographer Robert Leitzell shoots the sandstone pit from every angle, capturing the ritualised rhythms that Stone comes, not entirely willingly, to observe with his fellow inmate. Meanwhile Tristan Bechet’s often discordant score makes everything resonate with tension and foreboding – and Sheil, whose mere presence in a project these days serves to promise something idiosyncratic and unnerving, brings a quiet menace to her mysterious matriarch, calling all the shots without ever seeming to exercise any authority.

In The Seeding, the horror is ultimately existential, and the thrills are rooted as much in infernal abstractions as in lost boys‘ jeering threats. For here Clay is setting out our place in our bodies, in the company of other people, and indeed in the universe, all figured as a hole in which we can easily become stuck. This bleakly-mannered calling card sows seeds that will take root in the viewer’s mind and keep growing there long after the film has reached its bitter end.

The Seeding had its world première at Tribeca Film Festival 

You’ll Never Find Me opens with two disparate scenes. In the first, we see a woman, distorted and almost a silhouette, standing and soaking outside in a deluge of rain, just as she starts to lean in towards the window of a car from whose interior the scene is being shot. And in the second, as Betsy Brye’s Sleep Walk (1959) plays on a trailer’s radio at night, a middle-aged, bearded man sits, his back to the camera, with a mug on the table before him, and a small phial of clear liquid in the palm of his hand. The diptych formed by these two disparate scenes, the film’s alpha and omega, is rooted in the polarities of day and night, exterior and interior, woman and man – but the one element that merges them is a persistent, torrential downpour, washing from one scene to the next and permeating the soundtrack.

Whatever it is that that man (Brendan Rock) was going to do with that small bottle in his palm, he is interrupted, on this archetypal ‘dark and stormy night’, by a loud knocking at his caravan’s door – and as he reluctantly offers shelter from the rain to this young, soaking visitor (Jordan Cowan), and she just as reluctantly enters this older stranger’s home, situated at the shadowy end of a remote trailer park where people come to lose themselves, an awkward impasse settles between them. It is too tempestuous for her to venture out again to the payphone at the park’s entrance to call a car, and in any case, the front gate is locked at night – and so she stays, furtively taking in her new, constricted surroundings and ever so gradually warming to this courteous, softly spoken hermit.

“Our brains read joy and danger as the same thing,” the man will tell the visitor, “like a population of fucking moths.” He might as well be describing the sort of conflicting emotions that You’ll Never Find Me inspires in the viewer, thrilled by the immense tension which filmmakers writer Indiana Bell and her co-director Josiah Allen draw from every nuanced detail of these two characters’ exchanges. As the mysteries compound (what was the man doing before? How and why did the woman find her way to this sequestered trailer so late in the night? What has she fled? And why does she keep having disturbing visions of blood?), the dread palpably builds – although of what, exactly, remains elusive, at least until the third act – and there is a peculiar pleasure to be had in all the panic of all this unfolding paranoia.

You’ll Never Find Me is, for the most part, a two-hander, confining itself to an Aristotelian unity of time and place (a single trailer home in the wee hours), and further tightening the intensity of its spare scenario by gradually reducing the lighting and favouring tight close-ups. It is both a tour de force of minimalist filmmaking, and a class act, as Rock and Cowan barely ever raise their voices and give little away beyond their shared, infectious vibe of mutual suspicion, fear and mistrust. It is not until halfway through the film that we even learn the man’s name – and the visitor does not reciprocate with her own – yet much as when, to pass the time, these two play a game of Bullshit together with a deck of cards, they both have, beneath their poker faces, a number of tells. For here even the most casual-seeming of single lines or longer stories swapped between them is both concealing and slyly revealing a truth that weighs heavily in this claustrophobic milieu.

While the man is sure he recognises his visitor from somewhere, she seems less sure, and remains guarded and wary. “I’m just trying to work out what is actually happening here,” the woman will say amid all the unfolding mystery – and later, the man will ask: “What are you doing here? What are you actually doing here tonight, can you tell me that,” to which the woman will reply, “I just want the fucking key!” She means the key to the trailer’s door, but her words are as much metaphorical as literal – and once that key has been furnished (in fact it is always being furnished) by a meaningful convergence of echoing signifiers, a harrowing yet strangely satisfying turn of events is staged in this space of dark interiors and deep trauma. For as the cards are finally laid out on the table, every narrative choice, every feint and bluff, will find its place in the emerging psychodrama (complete with Hitchcockian shower scene).

Bell and Allen have been carefully honing their skills on a number of shorter collaborations, and this debut feature – an unsettling dialectic between male and female energies – comes too finely crafted to be reduced to the status of mere ‘calling card’, heralding the arrival of two extraordinary talents who are not just at the door, but have already turned your cosy headspace inside out and demanded your full, close attention. Together they stage the meeting of two lost souls, both lonely, both damaged, both haunted by a tragically shared fate. Even if it is the man who does most of the talking, the ‘little voice’ of his not altogether welcome guest must also be heard over all the other din – the radio, the wind, the rain, the creaking and knocking – that noisily assails the mind. Eventually the title, already a hermeneutic challenge, will assume ironies as layered as the caravan’s clutter, in a slow and twisty tale of humanity missing and conscience never completely buried.

You’ll Never Find Me had its world première at Tribeca Film Festival. Read more reviews at SciFiNow.