"Things Heard & Seen" most compelling without the ghosts

Things Heard & Seen (2021)

So many horror movies begin with a seemingly perfect family moving into a house with a past. That is just the beginning in “Things Heard & Seen,” which feels like two kinds of movie. One of them works better than the other, and it’s not the hokey Gothic ghost story. As a marital drama about toxic masculinity, domestic strife, and just full-on psychopathy, the film is most tense and compelling when it's peeling back the slick veneer of a spouse before the true colors are revealed. Given the atmospheric horror trappings, both modes have to meet in the end, of course, as if this were a cinematic duplex of “The Amityville Horror” and “All Good Things” (the 2010 Ryan Gosling-Kirsten Dunst film about the cold case story of Robert Durst and Kathleen McCormack). Between the mysticism, benign but not-so-helpful spirits, infernal Hudson Valley paintings, and a Lizzie Borden-esque axe murder, none of it quite builds to the cathartic or haunting conclusion that it must have wanted to be.

As the film opens, “Things Heard & Seen” sets an ominous tone. In the winter of 1980, a man returns home, pulling into his garage, only to have blood begin dripping on his windshield. He walks inside to find his daughter left alone. Something bad has clearly happened in this house, and it’s not the first or second time. The film then flashes back to last spring. The man, George Claire (James Norton), is living in Manhattan with his wife, Catherine (Amanda Seyfried), and their daughter, Frank (Ana Sophia Heger). Catherine is an experienced art restorer, but her eating disorder seems to be the most control she has over her own life. When George accepts a temporary teaching position at a liberal arts college, they are forced to make the move to an old house with strong bones in upstate New York. Too bad Zillow wasn’t created yet. 

George puts on the charisma to the department head, Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham), and wastes no time bedding college-aged equestrian (Natalia Dyer), while a colleague named Justine (Rhea Seehorn) sees right through George. While George is working, Catherine hires a hunky handyman, Eddy Lucks (Alex Neustaedter), to do work on the house and his brother, Cole (Jack Gore), to babysit Franny, unaware that they used to live in her house. Meanwhile, the couple can smell car fumes at night while in bed, and Franny keeps getting scared in her room. Of course, Catherine is the first to realize their house has secrets, finding relics left by the previous owners, like a bible of the damned owners and a woman’s ring. But she is nearly the last one to notice every red flag about her husband, who is not the man he appears to be. Perhaps the spirits of the house are trying to tell her something. 

Based on the novel “All Things Cease to Appear” (admittedly a better, less easy-to-forget title) by Elizabeth Brundage, “Things Heard & Seen” sees writing-directing couple Shari Springer and Robert Pulcini (2013’s “Girl Most Likely”) operating in a different genre. But their strengths reside more so in the live relationships and never seamlessly dovetail into the supernatural aspects. Like the Claires’ house, the bones of the film are sturdy. The craft is there, particularly in the moodiness and lived-in nature of the production design. George’s history—and the gradual process by which his ego gets broken down and he slips in keeping this charming pretense going—is subjectively more fascinating and disturbing than the history of the house or anything with its spectral beings. It seems like only ten months ago with the so-so “You Should Have Left” that Amanda Seyfried already moved into a spooky house with an untrustworthy husband, but she is engaging as Catherine, bringing emotional weight and expressing much with her beautiful wide eyes alone. James Norton is suitably smarmy and caddish as George, a pathologically lying narcissist, not far off from a certain talented Tom Ripley (there’s even some foul play on a sailboat). 

In addition to Seyfried and Norton whose Catherine and George are both signed and sealed to be damned, there is an excellent ensemble. F. Murray Abraham shares some wonderfully warm scenes, as Floyd DeBeers, a fellow spiritual believer who offers to hold a séance with Catherine, and Karen Allen is always welcome, if wildly underused, as Mare, a realtor who sold the house to the Claires. But no one gets to pop or be given as much to work with as the endlessly watchable Rhea Seehorn (AMC’s “Better Call Saul”) as Justine, a feminist weaver who takes a liking to Catherine. Every choice Seehorn makes, from the delivery of a line to a facial expression, is sharply played; one actually cares about Justine's safety when she grows more suspicious of George and may know too much.

Like the other supernatural horror offering this week—William Brent Bell’s not-very-good “Separation”—one can see what could have been with an ambitious concept, but it’s the execution that goes adrift. It’s just a shame Springer and Pulcini still haven’t really been able to find the right material since their acclaim with seriocomic Harvey Pekar biopic “American Splendor” from almost twenty years ago. Had the literal horror elements been stripped away, “Things Heard & Seen” might have felt less plodding like something we haven’t heard and seen many times before. There's just nothing scarier than the realization that the person you share a bed with is not the person you thought.

Grade: C +

Netflix is releasing “Things Heard & Seen” (119 min.) to stream on April 29, 2021.