The New Netflix Horror 'Things Heard & Seen' Sucks Butt
After moving to a small town with her husband, a young artist begins to suspect that their home harbors a dark secret.
This is a movie that is just incredibly confused. I think that if you boil down the story to its core components, read the wikipedia for it or a summary for the book its based off of, you see something good. Basically a family drama with a supernatural horror twist. Now, I would think that it would call for almost an arthouse horror type touch similar to that of ari aster or robert eggers. But Berman and Pulcini took a relatively cheap, conventional approach that you would see in shitty/high grossing horror movies and mixed it with 2 high caliber leads.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
I think acting is a good place to start. I actually liked Seyfried a lot and think she fit the role well. In fact, I think the one thing this movie made me excited for was for her to be in a pure family drama as a co-lead. I think James Norton was weird and offputting with purpose, but nobody else really struck a chord with me. F Murray Abraham wasn't super great, neither was Natalia Dyer.
From a technical point of view, it was a disaster. It was an over-pretentious, garbage script that you could almost see was painstaking for the actors to get through. On my first watch, I looked down during the date card and It took me until about halfway through to realize the movie wasn’t set in modern day which was weird as well. I like the colors they used, even if it felt a little overfamiliar for the shitty horror genre as well.
Part of the movie was like, a feminist revenge tale. They talk about the women who have been wronged in that house by men before, and those women try to communicate with Seyfried to stop her from getting killed as well. At the same time, the evil men that inhabited the house are talking to Norton. To me, that concept is a great idea. The evil men being egged on to do more evil by other evil men is obviously a very real thing so there is solid symbolism there. All of the women fighting to get revenge, even if its just posthumously, was cool and them being united by that common bond of the ring was cool too.
I just really hated how they executed it because it felt like they were trying to touch as many genres as possible but were completely reaching on all of them. The family drama wasn’t convincing enough, the supernatural angle wasn’t scary, the symbolism just felt pretentious.
The worst and most egregious part was the ending, which was total garbage. Him sailing away into hell and into that stupid painting, cut to black was just such a fuck you. It didn’t feel like revenge to me because it didn’t feel like Seyfried had a hand in it. It was just this guy going off into the sunset, literally. What makes me more pissed off was that i looked up this guy, Swedenborg, who Norton was obsessed with. His whole general idea is pretty basic in that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell because thats where both groups are happiest, respectively. So evil George basically went exactly where he wanted. Fucking cool I guess.