Alex Goyette’s debut “Breeder” is confidently weird enough to be riveting. The Tribeca chiller, now premiering on Shudder ahead of horror’s favorite holiday, is the kind of flick that could easily slip under the radar, even for genre nuts, and it deserves to be seen. It’s a promising first film with some brave, strange performances and ambitious screenwriting. If anything, it could have, and should have, pushed its out-there concept to even more surreal extremes as the protagonist’s fate becomes clearer. But the setup alone is so intriguing that it carries the movie to its relatively generic conclusion.
One reason for that intrigue is the truly committed performance from “GLOW” star Dot-Marie Jones, who plays the mysterious Patti, a woman who lives way off the grid in what looks like a dilapidated farmhouse. From the first time we see Patti, it’s clear something is very wrong in this house: Not “Texas Chainsaw” wrong, but give it time and it could get there in a generation or two. Patti has several young women living with her, and it’s unclear whether they’re her daughters. Are they being held prisoner? A cult? Whatever their backgrounds, they all obey every order from the taciturn Patti. Or else.
Coming from the city to the country, Russell (Daniel Doheny) enters Patti’s bizarre reality when she reaches out via social media and offers to fund the college student’s ambitious bee-breeding research project. Patti is also interested in breeding and has won awards for her work with canines. The secret this remote farmhouse hides is that Patti has taken her research to another level, branching out into something called eugenics. She will give Russell every penny he needs to get his work done if he agrees to be the stud for her operation, breeding a brilliant child with Ainsley (Maddie Phillips), maybe even more than one.
Goyette works with cinematographer Jaryl Lim to give “Breeder” an imposing, almost haunted visual language. Patti’s house isn’t haunted, yet the film often has the visual language of Gothic Horror: the dread that something awful will burst through the bedroom door in the middle of the night. Goyette also understands that such a bizarre what-if scenario demands a heavy dose of dark humor, filtered through his strikingly different leads: Doheny’s awkward discomfort and Jones’s stoic intensity. Doheny is an effectively confused, morally torn lead, while Jones echoes Annie Wilkes from “Misery” in how she mixes old-fashioned house rules with a sociopathic edge.
Of course, nothing is as easy as it sounds, and Russell finds himself trapped in an increasingly dangerous nightmare that won’t be spoiled, except to say that dog breeders don’t often think of their pets the way you do. Most importantly, Goyette grounds an impossible proposition: Imagine if all your dreams could come true if you were willing to be a sperm donor. Just don’t think about the amoral aspect of it all. Or that you have a girlfriend.
Third acts are especially tough for young filmmakers, and Goyette struggles a bit with “Breeder,” a movie that gets less interesting as its creepy concept gives way to something more like a survival thriller once the lines are drawn. Like many horror movies, the what-might-happen of “Breeder” is more engaging than the what-does-happen, but it’s still an undeniably strong debut, maybe not the best in show for the genre this year, but promising enough that its filmmaker could one day claim that title.
