‘Never trust the surly feral kid” should be up there with “don’t have sex” and “ignore the late-night phone call” as crucial horror-movie life advice. That’s where hiker Wyndham (Scott Haze), out in the wilds photographing an eclipse, goes wrong in this horror-fringed thriller. Lured away from his car by Orion (Charlie Avink), who claims his parents have gone awol, Wyndham becomes lost and takes refuge in a tin shack at the bottom of a canyon. It’s inhabited by Alina (Kate Lyn Sheil), a blank young woman who offers him soup of dubious provenance.

The next morning, Alina is oddly nonplussed when the ladder leading back to the top has disappeared. They are both prisoners of a gang of demented youths who live in “the palace” up yonder, and who literally micturate on Wyndham’s attempts to climb the sandstone cliff-face. With nothing doing, he and Alina form a kind of perverse Edenic couple, as she marks the passage of time on her bedroom wall with menstrual blood. But not for long: her belly starts to swell, and despite her attempts to lull him into joining her in acquiescence, Wyndham again starts bridling against his predicament.

While it’s a stretch to believe Wyndham would so rapidly go limp, the film benefits from debut feature director Barnaby Clay’s desire to transfix us with his artfully detailed redneck-biblical landscape. Chapters come embellished with titles such as Sturgeon Moon and frontispieced with a plate of decaying food; Clay also lavishes attention on dreary flotsam including hanging teaspoon wind-chimes and ritualistic climaxes deliriously soundtracked by Tristan Bechet. The under-characterised protagonist proceeds a little too easily towards his destiny in a rough stew of Mad Max, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mandy. But Haze is excellent: pacing, weeping, baring his teeth and adding ample unruly emotion to his prison.

• The Seeding is available on digital platforms on 12 February.