In The Weeds
2021 · 21m
Directed by Nick Milczarczyk
Genres: coming-of-age, mystery, thriller
A teenage girl suspects a local gardener's involvement in the unsolved disappearance of her childhood friend, and she and her friends decide to investigate.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent teen-sleuth mystery that lands exactly where you'd expect it to—suspicion, investigation, resolution—with none of the perverse wrinkles or narrative ambush that would make it actually interesting. Genre service, not genre subversion.
Milczarczyk assembles the mechanics of the thriller with deliberate control: the slow-burn reveal, the layered suspicion, the moral uncertainty of adolescent judgment. It's formally assured in ways that echo the lineage of Fincher's meticulous paranoia, though the execution doesn't quite reach that register.
The film's real strength is in how it uses the garden itself—the editing between wide, lush shots and tight, invasive close-ups creates genuine dread from visual language alone, turning landscape into suspect and making the budget constraint a tool rather than a limitation.