Things Heard & Seen Faces the Horrors of Privilege and Gaslighting Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini
Starring Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Natalia Dyer, Rhea Seehorn
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Calling Amanda Seyfried s character in
Things Heard & Seen a nervous-wife type would be to misread this multifaceted character. Nothing like the meek, saccharine mother archetype we re used to seeing in the many adaptations of the
Amityville murders or in the
Conjuring films, Seyfried s Catherine Claire is a charming, angry, endlessly relatable woman who is haunted firstly by her husband and secondly by her house. This upturning of a tired trope is a guiding theme in
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It’s rare that a film starts as bad as this one does and still manages to stick the landing.
Things Heard & Seen begins as a typical haunted house story riddled with cliches but somewhere along the way, the film finds a hold in the power of fate, destiny, and justice outside the law. This film from Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini is less horror and more spirituality, where the ghosts are the least of our worries.
George (James Norton) and Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) move to the Hudson Valley with their young daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger) into a large house from the 1800s. Naturally, it has a bloody history involving the original owners of the house and the most recent owners, the Vayle family, whose lone survivors, Eddie (Alex Neustaedter) and Cole (Jack Gore), get hired by Catherine to tend to the house and land. Corny horror tropes plague the first half of this film, with little to no tension before the hauntings start. Electricity flickers, ghostly lig
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One upside: A stellar performance from Amanda Seyfried.
• 4 min read
Anna Kooris/Netflix
Amanda Seyfried, as Catherine Clare, and F. Murray Abraham, as Floyd DeBeers, in a scene from Things Heard and Seen.
Everyone likes a juicy ghost story, right? So it’s a bummer that there’s no juice and little to like about “Things Heard and Seen,” debuting this week on Netflix. The film botches a potent premise about dysfunctional marriage and how the past can infect the present when a malignant male narcissist puts up a lethal resistance to his wife’s growing empowerment.
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Currently Reading Things Heard & Seen Review: A Marriage Story with Ghosts Starring Amanda Seyfried, Though Not Much Lies Beneath It
A half-intriguing, half-banal ghost story is the latest disappointment from directors Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman.
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Director: Robert Pulcini, Shari Springer Berman
With: Amanda Seyfried, James Norton, Rhea Seehorn, Ana Sophia Heger, F. Murray Abraham, Alex Neustaedter, Natalia Dyer, Karen Allen, Jack Gore, Michael O’Keefe, James Urbaniak.
It was 18 years ago how time flies in the indie world that the married directing team of Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman brought us “American Splendor,” an achingly humane, scabrously funny, miraculously playful and inventive lower-depths comedy based on the life and work of the lumpen verité comic-book diarist Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti in a performance of irascible brilliance. The movie was an