Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi
In
Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi, the camera is both an ostensible creative decision and a standalone character. Any other day, I would be happy to cite both as showcases of a director’s inspired adeptness. Not today.
The film opens on a familiar-looking house in the dead of the night. The camera floats through an open gully, then stops, recoils as if it hasn’t made up its mind, spots an open corridor, drifts through an open courtyard, through another corridor, straight into a room with a boy playing a piano, eventually settling to stand on the far corner of a room.
Things Heard & Seen is a Netflix film that brings to life the world of Elizabeth Brundage’s
All Things Cease to Appear and the alluring mystery of the Hudson River Valley. The setting for stories like
The Headless Horseman and other frightening tales, it’s always forcing people to wonder how this little area of New York seems to remain timeless.
Talking with writers and directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, they brought influences from their own time in the Hudson River Valley, as well as Brundage’s story, to life in a seemingly timeless movie with
Things Heard & Seen.
James Norton and Amanda Seyfried in
Things Heard & Seen. Rhea Seehorn in
Photo by Anna Kooris/Netflix No matter what type of story any particular movie is trying to tell, success usually comes when a mood is set early. Filmmakers can try all the plot trickery they want, but if they forget about establishing the tone of the film relatively early in the story, the twists and turns can be for naught. Co-writers/co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini make sure to follow that mandate in
Things Heard & Seen, and, just as crucially, let the mood simmer throughout the film’s two-hour running time instead of forcing the issue. The film centers on Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and George Claire (James Norton), a couple who move with their young daughter to rural New York in 1980 when James gets a job teaching at the local college.
Courtesy Of Anna Kooris/Netflix
Malice Domestic Norton and Seyfried play a couple whose marriage deteriorates in their creepy new home in this attempt at an arty scare flick. Our streaming entertainment options are overwhelming and not always easy to sort through. Certain people have a bottomless appetite for haunted-house stories, and Netflix knows I m one of them. But what really convinced me to watch the streaming service s latest glossy gothic was that its opening credits feature a slideshow of Hudson River School paintings, including Thomas Cole s four-part allegory
The Voyage of Life. I saw Cole s haunting series when I was a child at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y., and it shaped my view of life and death alike. At the time, my family were Manhattan transplants living in a remote, ramshackle farmhouse in upstate New York much
Stranger Things) hit last month. And it has horror movie fans divided.
Check out some reactions and also more info below.
Just watched Netflix s horror-drama THINGS HEARD AND SEEN, so I should be able to answer this question myself, and yet…
What the everlovin hell did I just watch? pic.twitter.com/RC5vcLcEXR Tasha Robinson (@TashaRobinson) April 30, 2021
Things Heard and Seen on #Netflix
I heard.
I did not understand.
Or is it just the post-vax fever and chills making my dumb? Adriana Palanca (@apalanca) April 30, 2021
@netflix please put a content/trigger warning for an eating disorder on the movie Things Heard and Seen