The otherworldly force in the house is drawn to their conflict and their resentments - or possibly is feeding it? That’s one of the things that’s manifestly unclear right up to the abrupt, baffling ending. Meanwhile, she’s gaslighting him about her eating disorder, and concealing how miserable she is while also finding reasons to be passive-aggressively unkind to him. He’s a liar and a cheat who blames his choices on her behavior. Catherine and George’s marriage looks an awful lot like the similarly fraying relationship in Sean Durkin’s The Nest, with a fair percentage of The Talented Mister Ripley sprinkled in. Things Heard & Seen, based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel All Things Cease to Appear, spends most of its runtime building an unconventional ghost story out of an entirely conventional relationship drama. Murray Abraham, always enjoyable) gives her his warm and supportive theories on spiritualism, she’s immediately in favor of a seance - with George, a disdainful cynic, distinctly not invited. She immediately starts to sympathize with the household ghost, and when George’s boss Floyd (F. But one thing that’s immediately unusual in Things Heard & Seen is that Catherine doesn’t seem particularly unnerved by the apparition or the effects. The slow-burn ghost story that follows starts out according to the usual haunted-house rules, at least in most respects: Electric lights flicker, Franny sees a mysterious female figure in her room, objects around the house move without being touched, and so forth. It turns out that she’s right to be unnerved by his insistence on the house: The place has seen some horrors, and there’s an active supernatural presence there. There’s clearly something wrong in Catherine’s life, given that she’s starving herself and forcing herself to vomit up what food she does eat, and even early on, she flinches as, for instance, George picks out their new home in the tiny town of Chosen, pressuring her when she shows even token resistance. Catherine has a satisfying job as an expert art restorer, but when George announces to their friends that he’s completed his dissertation and has been offered a teaching job at a private college in upstate New York, she drops her career meekly, without complaint, telling a close friend that she owes George her support. And as a metaphor, it’s the most consistent and compelling thing in a bizarrely confused movie.Īmanda Seyfried and The Nevers’ James Norton star as Catherine and George Claire, a married couple raising a 4-year-old daughter, Franny, in 1980 Manhattan. In a movie like Netflix’s baffling new horror-drama Things Heard & Seen, the haunted house is a metaphor as much as a horror device, a symbol of a place that should be a warm, protective home but isn’t, and an emblem of a commitment that’s difficult to escape. But a house represents a commitment, a sunk cost that’s extremely difficult to walk away from. And people being threatened by something they don’t understand, whether it’s a curse or a creature, can always investigate and try to come to terms with the unknown. Horror-movie protagonists dealing with an evil doll can at least try to get rid of it slasher victims can at least try to run away from the danger. On the other hand, after his evil deeds – influenced by the lingering spirit of the murderous Calvin Vayle – George faces the full wrath of the powers that be as we see his fate mirrors that on the cover of Emanuel Swedenborg’s book.Look a little deeper at just about any decent haunted-house movie, and you’ll almost always see a story about people who feel trapped by some larger aspect of their lives. However, rather than looking to harm the house’s new resident, the ghostly presence of Ella Vayle is simply there to help ease the passing of Catherine during the film’s bloody conclusion. Like the book, the film explores the concepts of the afterlife, most clearly shown in the ghostly haunting of Catherine and George’s new home. The book – and more notably its cover art ( The Valley of the Shadow of Death by George Inness) – appear throughout Things Heard & Seen as the film explores the relationship between the living and the dead and how evil deeds are punished. Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen (to give the book its full name) is a key inspiration behind the Netflix film and even its title. Emanuel Swedenborg in Things Heard & Seen
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