Mark Reviews Movies: THINGS HEARD & SEEN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 28, 2021

There are plenty of secrets in Things Heard & Seen—about ghosts and about a few marriages and about the depths to which a less-than-mediocre man will sink in order to get what he thinks he deserves. Co-writers/co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's movie takes its time, not in exploring any of these ideas, but in assuring that we know it has the potential to examine them. It barely scratches the surface.

It is, to be fair, kind of tantalizing to watch as the filmmakers, adapting Elizabeth Brundage's novel All Things Cease to Appear, establish and demolish a series of expectations. At the start, we think this is just an observational study of a marriage on the rocks from an absence of communication. Once the family arrives at a farm in upstate New York from the big city, the elements of a ghost story come into play. Just as we're getting our bearings on the tragic history of this house and its occupants, the movie shifts gears once again, putting one character's every word and action into a new context.

It's an admittedly ambitious game of narrative and thematic sleight-of-hand, although the filmmakers make a few too many moves in the process. By the end, we're left feeling as if we haven't seen an actual story, only a lot of shuffling premises and ideas, and are left with a sense that, really, none of it mattered.

In 1980, Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and George Claire (James Norton) live in New York City with their young daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger). She's an artist, and he recently completed his doctorate in art history (He used to paint but found himself not up to snuff). A college upstate has offered George a teaching position, and with a lot of assumptions about and not a single bit of conversation with his wife, George has bought an abandoned dairy farm near the school. They're moving. That's the end of the non-existent discussion.

Catherine makes the best of it, working on putting the house in order and hiring a pair of local, orphaned brothers, named Eddy (Alex Neustaedter) and Cole (Jack Gore), to do some yard work. While George becomes instantly popular with his art students and makes friends with the department president (played by F. Murray Abraham), Catherine and Franny start to sense and see a ghostly figure in the house. George's eyes, meanwhile, are drawn to Willis (Natalia Dyer), a college-aged local woman who's taking a break from school.

For better and for worse, we're never quite certain where any of these assorted through lines are going. There's a palpable sense of mystery to the house and its long-gone occupants, each of whom seem to have disappeared or died under enigmatic or violent circumstances. Catherine and George can smell gasoline fumes in their bedroom. Franny can't spend a night in her room, certain that there's a shrouded woman in there with her. Catherine does some research on who the spirit might have been, and eventually, the real estate agent (played by Karen Allen) who sold George the house reveals a missing piece—and that George has been keeping yet another secret from his wife.

The stuff with the ghost or ghosts plays out with mostly anticlimactic purpose (It exists here, ultimately, to prompt the notion of a kind of cosmic justice and, oddly, as an excuse for what some men in the past and present have done). The real meat of the story has little to do with Catherine, who just keeps learning information until the sudden end of her story—the revelation of what George sees in a flash-forward prologue.

This becomes George's story in a way that's partly unnerving, in terms of what he eventually does, but mostly unconvincing, because of both the ridiculous escalation of events (not to mention the otherworldly explanation for his actions and the passive way in which his many sins are answered) and Norton's feeble, whiny performance. The central idea here—that abuse and violence exist in a kind of cosmic cycle—is superficially intriguing. The actual content of this story—which brings so much death and devastation—makes that idea feel slight and slightly dismissive of these terrible actions.

Things Heard & Seen tries to do a lot, presenting a ghost story, a spiritual theory of evil and justice, and the study of a person driven by his own failings. It's far too much, as it turns out, amounting to very little.

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