After being victims of gentrification Rainer (Hanno Koffler) moves his family to the outskirts of the city to a house that needs a lot of work. As he toils away at home and on a building site where his position as site manager is appearing more and more precarious, his thirteen-year-old daughter Doreen (Dora Zygouri) befriends neighbour Mara (Lilith Julie Johna) whose family is a lot richer than her own.

Comparisons to social dramas from Ken Loach can be easily made as Rainer and his family are put through more and more financial and emotional turmoil. However, while the cast is good in their roles – Koffler is especially engaging – the narrative they’re in is pretty simple. As more and more burdens are place on the family, you hardly ever see why this is happening. Is it their family specifically that’s hit a rough patch, or is it part of a wider social issue and they’re not alone in this struggle? Naturally as The Seed is a German film there could well be context clues that I as a Brit living in the UK did not pick up on but it does feel like a simple way to tell this story.

Rainer’s storyline can be frustrating at times as he, like many of his fellow workers, have worked for this company for years and feels some loyalty to it. This is exacerbated by company owner Klose (Robert Stadlober) who makes promises that from an outside perspective you can see he has no intention of keeping. Rainer’s situation shows how while companies may preach that they are a family company and any success benefits all the workers, in reality that’s not the case and no one is irreplaceable.

Doreen’s struggles are typical coming-of-age fare. She’s had to leave behind her friends and the new girl she befriends has a cruel streak. As she yearns for friendship, she finds herself in situations where Mara is convincing her to steal or play dangerous tricks on other girls and when she does stand up for herself, she becomes the target.

The parallels between father and daughter and their struggles couldn’t be more on the nose. While Rainer is having to deal with a cruel and two-faced boss, Doreen is spending time with someone who is more of a bully than a friend. The way their relationship troubles build mirrors one another until they both reach their breaking point. The cutting between Rainer and Doreen’s final confrontations with their tormentors is inevitable and while it’s unsurprising, the way these confrontations turn out lead to an interesting juxtaposition.

The sound design is one notable aspect of The Seed. Any time Rainer gets overwhelmed by his situation, it’s like his anxiety spikes and a high-pitched whining, rumbles of thunder and steady but foreboding drumbeat drown out everything else around him. The sound is suffocating and is a great audio-visualisation of his current emotional state. Continuing the themes of daughter’s life mirroring her father’s, while it doesn’t happen as often to Doreen, the same techniques are implemented when everything becomes too much for her too.

While everything does slowly build to a crescendo, The Seed finishes with an open-ending. After everything that’s come before it’s hard to think of a conclusion that could be happy or even concrete while still being realistic. However, it does mean that you’re left feeling dejected and unsatisfied because as a people we tend to strive for some semblance of hope or light even in the darkest of stories, and here there is very little of that for this family. 3/5.