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. The tension builds as his glossy veneer tarnishes completely and we’re left with the true villains of this story: mediocre men with PhDs in gaslighting. The more she learns about the house, which has seen its fair share of abhorrent men, ill-kept secrets about its history and George’s own past lead Catherine to question everything he’s ever told her. As Catherine looks into the home’s sordid history and attempts to forge relationships in town, her husband becomes increasingly controlling and erratic. 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. 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.”Īfter 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. What sacrifices, exactly, we never learn.Įventually, they do make it to the home George purchased without consulting his wife. When a friend of Clare’s points out that she’s a “big city girl with your dream job” about to give up everything she’s worked so hard for, Clare rationalizes that George has “made some big sacrifices” for her. The dialogue starts off excruciatingly unoriginal, which is a surprise coming from a writing and directing team like Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (American Splendor). Unfortunately, the first 25 minutes of the film are packed with so much exposition it felt like forever before we even made it out of the city. 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. Things Heard & Seen starring the Oscar-nominated Amanda Seyfried ( Mank) and perpetual scary creep James Norton (Happy Valley) is not one of those movies.īased 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. 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. 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.
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