Things Heard and Seen review: A middling paranormal thriller

Fresh off of an Oscar nomination for her turn as starlet Marion Davies in Mank, Amanda Seyfried has reunited with Netflix for her latest project: Things Heard and Seen, a psychological thriller that walks the line between horror and drama. Though it’s certainly an ambitious attempt, Things Heard and Seen tries to tie together too many narratives at once and ends up being a largely muddled two-hour flick that feels like a Lifetime movie with a Netflix budget.

Starring Amanda Seyfried as a bulimic young housewife named Catherine. When she and her husband George (James Norton) move to rural New York to accommodate George’s new teaching position, things begin to quickly unravel as she realizes the house they’re living in may be haunted.  As Catherine (a staunch believer in the supernatural) grows more and more paranoid about the inhabitants of her house, she struggles to keep her own sanity straight while also navigating a tumultuous relationship with George, whose volatile personality leads to shocking revelations about his own background.

Based on the (400+ page!) novel All Things Cease to Appear by Elizabeth Brundage, Things Heard and Seen is one of those films where you can tell it’s adapted from a book, even without possessing that knowledge beforehand. By all accounts the plot is the typical mystery-thriller: part and parcel with marital infidelity, psychotic husbands, dramatic car crashes, and a creaky old house with a mysterious past. It’s very much the type of book (and film) that your mother and her friends might cover in a monthly book club – it has all the right pieces for heightened drama, but it feels more soapy than scary.

And speaking of scary, Things Heard and Seen certainly isn’t – although it attempts to market itself as such. Though the trailers paint the film as a ghostly haunt a-la The Conjuring or The Poltergeist, Things Heard and Scene is a by-the-numbers thriller with a shiny coat of horror paint that never delves beyond the surface. Although the specter follows typical fare like moving objects in the night of flickering the lights, the ghost plotline could be removed from the film entirely, and the bare bones would still be very much the same – just more rooted in psychological drama than otherworldly haunts.

The plot itself is so typical by-the-numbers thriller that, even though the ghost element was introduced early on, when things truly take a turn for the supernatural in the last half hour, it feels out of nowhere and rushed. While the film may be remarkably well-paced (given that’s an area book-to-movie adaptions tend to struggle with) it doesn’t quite find a way to juggle the interpersonal drama properly with the murderous ghost story undercurrent, and the result is disjointed and muddy as opposed to two stories working in tandem.

To the film’s credit, though, it does attempt to tackle some interesting ideas – especially when it comes to the main couple, Catherine and George. Catherine, as we mentioned, is bulimic, and George frequently weaponizes her eating disorder against her any time he needs to put her down or discredit her decisions. George himself is a walking, talking, gaslight of a human being – who’s forging recommendation letters and posing as a gifted artist when he’s not busy fooling around with a college girl or trying to make his wife think she’s insane.

However, the way the film weaves the ghost element in with Catherine and George’s narrative almost makes a mockery of what could be a very powerful, poignant story about manipulation and abuse. The supernatural element cheapens the very real and very common struggle that Catherine faces to escape from the grasp of her abusive husband – although we assume the author’s original intent was to have the ghost narrative strengthen Catherine’s, and vice versa.

Amanda Seyfried is suitable as the paranoia and anxiety-ridden Catherine – she makes for a formidable lead, and certainly a believable one, but at the same time, she doesn’t particularly elevate the material or give a performance memorable enough to make us consider a re-watch. The standout of theist, ironically, is James Norton as the borderline-psychotic husband George – though that’s also probably due to the fact that his character is so balls-to-the-wall nuts, it would be hard to make him boring.

The ensemble cast is remarkably impressive for a film of this nature – including Better Call Saul‘s Rhea Seehorn as Justine, a friend of Amanda’s who runs afoul of George’s plotting. Seehorn, as always, makes the most of her screen time, but like Seyfried, her material isn’t nearly interesting enough to make the character all that remarkable.

Flat-out bad is Stranger Things‘ Natalia Dyer as Willis, the young woman with whom George starts an affair. The character is a flimsily written jumble of cliches so that George has someone to cheat with, but Dyer isn’t doing herself any favors with the hammy, apathetic acting choices she makes. Rounding out the ensemble is Karen Allen (Marion Ravenwood to Indiana Jones fans) who’s a highlight, but underutilized.

Try as it might to bring both drama and scares, Things Heard and Seen trips over its own feet and ends up doing neither well. Though there’s certainly enough material to make for a formidable story and enough talent in the cast to carry it out, the jumbled narrative and thematic beats result in a middling thriller whose paranormal posturing can’t save it from mediocrity.

Are you planning to watch Things Heard and Seen? Let us know what you think!