Zerno (The Seed): A Walkabout Through Genres and Eras

Ksenia Bugrimova’s 23-minute Zerno chronicles a woman’s experiment to find lasting love within an alternate universe that came into the 21st century without quite leaving the last one behind. The best of both worlds, as they say, but here it is also the modestly weird of both worlds.

The unnamed woman (a pitch-perfect Olga Grishina) in this wordless, uncrowded, non-romance sci-fi is independent, emotionally available enough to want love, and determined enough to pursue it. Her methods add disturbing to that list of descriptors—and it is not because she grows a man from a seed in her apartment. (Growing handsome men from seeds is an established option in this universe, though taboo enough that the purchase process is a surreptitious operation in the basement of the pharmacy that retains the aura of an apothecary.) Instead, her Frankensteinian, Humbert-esque approach to raising her own lover (Gleb Matsibora) involves control and discipline, all without uttering a word. For his part, stuck in his barrel in the woman’s sparsely furnished studio apartment as a model/plant/pet with limited mobility and even less autonomy, the seed-man is understandably ill-tempered with little scope to vent it.

The film gives it an eccentric treatment that is generally effective at smoothing out the potential for horror, with scenes like the woman dragging the seed-man in his barrel across cobbled stone streets for a date night (which sours easily, not unlike dinner with a toddler in tow) giving it a last century fantasy adventure feel. In the absence of dialogue, the background score takes its place to express the minutiae of thought and mood.

Zerno makes for an interesting film, simultaneously pleasant and discordant, modern and old-world. The cuteness—and it is there—runs atop the tension of the precarity of the situation. The actors are pretty to look at, and their charm steers the characters’ friction into rom-com territory. Nonetheless, the dynamic develops less as a potential romance and more as a pairing that, if it does not end in disaster, will be a fond memory with the lens of distance.

Watch Zerno (The Seed) Short Film