Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini
Starring: Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Natalia Dyer, Rhea Seehorn, Alex Neustaedter, F. Murray Abraham
There's a prominent kitchen sink in
Things Heard & Seen that happens to be the exact same
shade of green as the infamous bathroom from Kubrick's
The Shining. The movie, directed by the American Splendor duo of
Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, does take place in
1980, so maybe that shade was prominent in fittings at the time. Nah, who
am I kidding; this entire movie is indebted to Kubrick's film. It's
another tale of an asshole whose worst tendencies are encouraged by the
haunted house he moves his family into. Add in dash of
The Amityville Horror, a smidgen of What Lies Beneath, garnish with Michael Winner's 'Turn of the Screw' prequel
The Nightcomers, and you have a horror movie that's trying very hard to plug into the
contemporary debate around "toxic masculinity" but is devoid of original
ideas.
The asshole in question here is George (James Norton), a slimy art
professor who moves his long-suffering timid wife Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and their young daughter from their NYC apartment to an old farmhouse
in upstate New York to accommodate his taking a position at a provincial
college in the area. The house is a steal, but George doesn't divulge the
dark history that has pushed its price down – a previous male tenant
slaughtered his family within its walls.
While Catherine finds herself struggling with the isolation of her new
rural home, George seems happy to be escaping some ambiguous past. Soon
he's banging a teenage neighbour (Natalia Dyer) and hitting on a
fellow faculty member (Rhea Seehorn). But when a ghost in the home
begins communicating with Catherine, George's secrets are in danger of
being exposed.
Things Heard & Seen is, to put it mildly, a mess. Berman
and Pulcini seem far more interested in making a psychological thriller
than crafting a ghost story, and the latter element feels awkwardly tacked
on. They display little ability to craft scares or build tension. The
haunting is represented by a series of clichés as old as the house they
occur in, right down to a piano playing itself. The film's key plot
revelations are conveyed by characters relating random anecdotes that clue
Catherine and the audience into what's going on here. It's not so much
things heard and seen as things told, not shown.
This is indicative of how televisual the whole affair feels, particularly
in its glacial pacing and lack of economical storytelling. The flat
digital sheen so common in Netflix''s mid-budget productions is an ill-fit
with the period setting, and if it's trying to evoke the horror movies of
that era it sure doesn't borrow any of their memorable visuals.
Norton certainly makes for an instantly unlikeable villain, which makes it
a shame that the movie couldn't have dispensed with its ghost story
subplot (which it clearly has little interest in exploring) and focussed
instead on spinning a tale of an evil husband. But then it would still be
saddled with the heavy-handed dialogue that keeps telling us that we're
watching a film about "toxic masculinity".
Things Heard & Seen desperately wants to be a horror
movie for our moment, but it's unlikely to haunt your thoughts for more
than a minute.
Things Heard & Seen is on
Netflix now.
