Remembering Amanda Seyfried's Netflix Horror Film And The Beating It Took From Critics
Filmmakers Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini got their start with a documentary about a famous Los Angeles restaurant called "Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's," but broke through the world of narrative features with "American Splendor," a comedy biopic starring Paul Giamatti about the underground comic book writer, Harvey Pekar. At the 93rd Academy Awards, Amanda Seyfried snagged a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her work in "Mank," David Fincher's biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz released by Netflix. In the year that followed, Berman and Plucini linked up with Seyfried and Netflix to make "Things Heard and Seen" based on the novel "All Things Cease to Appear" by Elizabeth Brundage.
Seyfried was cast as the star, but she was joined by "Stranger Things" favorite Natalia Dyer, "Better Call Saul" standout Rhea Seehorn, Karen Allen of "Indiana Jones" fame, Academy Award-winner F. Murray Abraham, Academy Award-nominee Michael O'Keefe, legendary character actor and voiceover artist James Urbaniak, "Happy Valley" star James Norton, and "Colony" star Alex Neustaedter. With a great cast, a great creative team, and source material praised by Stephen King, "Things Heard and Seen" had everything going for it ... so why does it have a 38% critics score and 22% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes?
Unfortunately, it's because the film failed to reach the heights of the haunting book and stellar cast, delivering a final product that felt like a disappointing rehash of Robert Zemeckis' "What Lies Beneath," itself a riff on the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
A half-baked thriller
Set in the 1980s, "Things Heard and Seen" is about a woman named Catherine Clare (Amanda Seyfried) who moves to the Hudson Valley after her husband (James Norton) starts a new job as an art history teacher, reluctantly becoming a stay-at-home mom on an old dairy farm after a life in Manhattan. As is the case with most horror films where someone moves to the country, Catherine starts to suspect there is a sinister presence in her new home, and something seriously wrong with her marriage. If you have read Brundage's book, you'll know the reveal is that there's nothing supernatural happening at all, so the horror-thriller quickly goes the route of true crime.
Unfortunately, this means that "Thing Heard and Seen" then pivots into a paint-by-numbers true crime film, and the horror set up in the first three-fourths of the movie is abandoned for a drama. It's a shame, because there is an effective, lingering sense of unease enveloping the entire movie and a handful of truly spooky moments, but it isn't enough to save the final product.
All of the actors are committing to their characters and it never feels like anyone is phoning it in, but condensing Brundage's novel to a feature runtime doesn't allow the film to breathe, and much of the creeping dread found in the book is abandoned ... so when the even bigger twist is revealed, it feels completely unearned. Honestly, this is one of the few instances where a mini-series adaptation would have been preferable to a film, if only so the tension had more time to build. All of the elements are there to tell a truly great thriller, it just didn't come together in the end.