tiff24: 'seeds' review

By Nadia Dalimonte

Kaniehtiio Horn in Seeds

​From starring in Vanessa Matsui’s endearing web series Ghost BFF to appearing on hit television shows Letterkenny and Reservation Dogs, Kaniehtiio Horn is an exciting talent in the Canadian scene and beyond. Horn continues to show intriguing range with her feature directorial debut Seeds, which premiered in the 2024 TIFF Discovery program. Incorporating the ingredients of a home invasion thriller, a dark comedy, and a twisted horror, Horn crafts a genre film about preserving Indigenous legacy. While the film falls short in balancing various tones, Seeds finds moments to bud in the layered groundwork. Horn shows a singular voice in her thoughtful commentary on seedy corporations and in a well-defined slice of contemporary reservation life. Her potential behind the camera makes for a worthwhile experience that leaves you with the glimmers of bigger and better things to come.

In Seeds, Horn plays a Kanien’kehaka (Mohawk) woman named Ziggy who aims to make it big as a social media influencer. Much to her excitement, she lands a job promoting Nature’s Oath, a seed and fertilizer company that checks off the boxes of an environmentally conscious venture. Showered with big cheques and branded swag, Ziggy spreads the seeds of Nature’s Oath to her growing subscribers. The opportunity feels too good to be true, but Ziggy presses on in the hope of making a decent income and progressing in an exciting new direction.

Nature’s Oath becomes the driving force of Ziggy’s decision making. When her cousin (Dallas Goldtooth) calls her to house-sit for a relative in the middle of the woods, Ziggy reluctantly agrees on one condition: the place must have a stable Internet connection. She finds a hot spot that overlooks much of the community, just as her reliability on the company comes to a halt. When her cousin finds out about Nature’s Oath, he feverishly explains why she needs to stop. The company plants seeds in a corrupt avenue of industrial agriculture; they are the enemy, and with Ziggy’s endorsement, she is selling out to her community. What begins as a promising social media gig quickly becomes a contradiction of values, and a matter of life and death. The company breeds a violent stranger sent to follow Ziggy into her small Kanien’kehaka community and steal her family’s legacy for corporate gain. As Ziggy fights to protect the seeds on this reservation, she taps into the ancestral history of her people and the horrors that have threatened multi-generational land.

Written and directed by Horn, Seeds has a consistent and clear voice throughout, though her narrative focus spreads very thin. The attempts to juggle multiple stories in one shot falls flat. The film jumps from a home invasion thriller, to a family drama, to a blood-soaked horror fest, without a strong through line to hold all the tonal shifts together. As a result, Seeds plays out as a collection of ideas rather than a cohesive narrative. The most effective layer — using the seeds as a metaphor for fertilizing a healthy environment or pollinating with toxicity — gets lost beneath stylized and generic genre choices. With an imbalance in the story and tone, the emotional stakes feel rushed, as does the spiral into twisted horror in the final act. While an interesting choice to visualize Ziggy’s moral stance and the significance of exacting her revenge, the decision arrives too late in the game to have a stronger impact.

The film thrives more in how Horn populates a small community with unique detail and shared history. She strongly establishes the setting, and makes ancestral connections between characters who give voice to the legacy Ziggy fights for. The film also does a neat job visualizing the protagonist’s frame of mind and the crime culture that influences her. First Nations actor Graham Greene appears as a figment of her imagination, specifically in hosting mode. Many who grew up in Canada know Greene from the show Exhibit A: Secrets of Forensic Science, in which he hosted a series of cold cases through the 1980s and 90s. His iconic presence, used as a guiding voice for Ziggy’s conscience, brings out a nostalgic quality and adds personality to the film.

While Seeds may not entirely work tonally or narratively, Kaniehtiio Horn sprinkles her feature directorial debut with enough vision to exist in a world of its own.