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Apr 29, 2021 · ‘Things Heard & Seen’ Review: Another Real Estate Nightmare. Amanda Seyfried and James Norton move into a haunted house in this busy, creaky Netflix thriller. Share full article. Amanda...
- Should this Netflix supernatural thriller be heard or seen?
- Netflix Spotlight: April 2021
- Worst Reviewed Movies of 2021
- Verdict
By Emily Tannenbaum
Updated: Nov 4, 2022 12:22 am
Posted: Apr 28, 2021 10:00 pm
Things Heard and Seen debuts exclusively on Netflix on April 29.
By now, Netflix has created its own subgenre of digestible thrillers that nuzzle into the public discourse for a moment until they release a new one the week later. Not quite B-movies (though Velvet Buzzsaw came close), there is still a level of camp to Bird Box, I Am Mother, and even the hilariously bad Secret Obsession starring Brenda Song that draws people onto Twitter to ask, what the hell did I just watch? Especially in times like these, it’s almost a bonding experience. Things Heard & Seen starring the Oscar-nominated Amanda Seyfried (Mank) and perpetual scary creep James Norton (Happy Valley) is not one of those movies.
Based on the novel All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage, the supernatural drama follows a young family of three picking up their comfortable life in 1980s Manhattan for a decrepit dairy farm in the fictional upstate town of Chosen, New York. Catherine Claire (Seyfried) is a prominent art restorer with a debilitating eating disorder that is giving up her illustrious career to allow her husband George (Norton) a chance to pursue his own as an art history professor.
Eventually, they do make it to the home George purchased without consulting his wife. It clearly needs a lot of work, but “look at these bones!” In case you didn’t know, that’s scary movie 101 for “this house is haunted as hell.”
After a rough start, the Things Heard & Seen finds its footing for a moment when it stops telling us about the Clares and we get to see the couple as they truly are: fractured and toxic. While Catherine is haunted by the presence of potentially malevolent spirits, George dismisses her concerns with condescending jokes and patronizing concerns that make it easy for herself and others to doubt her experiences. As Catherine looks into the home’s sordid history and attempts to forge relationships in town, her husband becomes increasingly controlling and erratic.
Still, Seyfried and Norton’s layered performances don’t make up for a messy attempt at creating a supernatural allegory for the trauma of emotional abuse. Unlike the 2020 Blumhouse thriller The Invisible Man, which uses the genre to amplify the horror of being trapped in a relationship with a charming abuser, Things Heard & Seen distracts from its most compelling moments with hokey séances and frankly boring lore.
One bright spot of the film is a sardonic college student played by Natalia Dyer (Stranger Things) who breaks down George’s facade even as she partakes in their illicit affair. “You think because I f*** you, I’m fooled by you,” she asks him. “My dad made a fortune defending them: thieves, conmen, psychopaths. And they all got off because that’s the way the world works for men.” If Pulcini and Berman followed that thread instead of attempting to tie everything into their convoluted mythology, Things Heard & Seen might have made a bigger impact.
As I watched the two-hour Netflix thriller, I kept thinking back to director Andrew Jarecki’s 2010 project All Good Things, which starred Ryan Gosling and Kristen Dunst as another bright-eyed couple who fled New York City in the 1980s for life in the country to devastating results. With similar themes and an equally talented cast, I couldn’t help b...
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Apr 29, 2021 · “Things Heard & Seen” is partly a Gothic horror movie and partly a portrait of a marriage falling apart. It’s more effective as the latter than the former, but by the end these two seemingly separate kinds of movie dovetail in a way that’s surprisingly clever and effective.
Apr 28, 2021 · Things Heard & Seen is a film that Netflix could almost have been invented for, and was, in fact, put together specifically for the streamer: a back-of-the-rack Blockbuster video with some...
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Things Heard & Seen is a 2021 American horror film written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, based on the novel All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage. [1] It stars Amanda Seyfried and James Norton .
