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Trim Season follows a group of jobless- directionless twenty-something women (and one enby) from Los Angeles as they head up the coast to make quick cash trimming marijuana on a secluded farm in Humbolt County.
Once they’re cut off from the rest of the world, they realize that the estate is harboring darker secrets than illegal weed farming, as they race against time to escape the dense woods with their lives. At the centre of the mystery and danger is the farm’s proprietor, Mona – a beautiful woman who carries a aura of polite malice. Seemingly kind and welcoming, she’s often adorned in out-of time accoutrements – pearls, long gloves and dresser that seems suited to a 19th-century widow. It’s not long before our freelancers learn the perils of crossing her.
Trim Season is pretty strong until it loses the thread a little in the third act (possibly trouble in the editing suite, if not the script). Even then there’s a late-breaking gore moment that had me cackling. The basic setup of a remote cannabis farm will be somewhat familiar to anyone who has seen Tori and Lokita, although that was a hothouse plant and this is a more traditional forest hillside farm setup. Trim Season has the same sense of menace though, and that’s before people start bleeding out of their eye sockets.
Also: shout out to the filmmakers for casting a non-binary role with someone with visible top surgery scars and have it not be “the point” or any sort of source of the horror. Just someone with top scars, trying to do their thing while some sort of cannabis witch is on the prowl. We love to see it.
Recommended for fans of witches, bleeding eyes, and queer representation!
Trim Season played at the Overlook Film Festival, and will be released later in 2023
Whitlock&Pope 