THINGS HEARD AND SEEN | FILM REVIEW
Dir: Shari Springer Berman / Robert Pulcini (15, 121 mins)
A plodding drama with supernatural elements that never really takes off, despite the best efforts of those involved and an abundance of intellectual, painterly references. Based on the bestselling book All Things Cease by Elizabeth Brundage, this is set in 1980 with Amanda Seyfried’s virtuous wife and would-be painter upping sticks from the city with husband James Norton and daughter, so that he can take an academic post as a professor in a small college. The town is called Chosen, a sleepy place full of the privileged and the poor.
Seyfried and Norton’s marriage is already in trouble. She is a bulimic essentially being gaslit by Norton, and matters get even worse as they arrive at the house. Haunted by its previous occupants – an abusive husband and slaughtered wife – there are no prizes for guessing which way this could be headed.
Things Heard And Seen is a low-key haunted house film, interested in relationship dynamics with occasional unsettling moments; a seance with professor and occult specialist F. Murray Abraham is divertingly staged, but the film never really ratchets up the terror. The plot descends into possible possession and murder, with a bloody denouement that underwhelms. The adaptation feels rather empty at times, infidelities randomly happening with the likes of hired hands and students. The marriage’s faultlines are magnified by the house, but Norton and Seyfried already seem doomed from the start, robbing the film of any real tension.
Directors and adaptors Berman and Pulcini weave in some interesting quasi-philosophy via the mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg; likewise, George Inness’ 19th-century paintings hint at the afterlife being a continuation of the past and the present, yet all this lands less convincingly than it should. Horror film tropes are present but there is nothing that truly unsettles amidst these heard and seen things.
Out now via Netflix
words KEIRON SELF