Things Heard and Seen (2021)

 Score: 3 / 5

The latest Gothic horror movie is a mixed and messy bag, but its complex delights often outweigh its tonal and thematic eccentricities. Things Heard and Seen, a title taken from Emanuel Swedenborg's eighteenth-century Latin book Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen, manages to shallowly disturb during its early half before tilting into full dread as it reaches its climax. While the plot is never quite fresh, the way it's told is never less than interesting. The problem is that the film is so quiet, so moody and broody, and so filled with intangible ideas that it is utterly impossible to watch, understand, and appreciate with a phone in your hand. Or any other distractions, mind, which are sure to plague viewers watching this Netflix release in their living rooms.

When Catherine Clare, an art restorer in Manhattan, hears that her husband got a job teaching art history, you can start to see the cracks form in her otherwise ceramic face. Amanda Seyfried's wide eyes and stoic chin belie a psyche already on the verge of snapping, and our first experience of Catherine attempting to eat a single bite ends in her rushing to the toilet to purge. But her husband George, a handsome and sly James Norton, is eager to get started in what appears to be his dream job. Having toyed with creating art in his youth, he has now embraced his calling as a teacher, and so the couple and their daughter Franny move to a house further up the Hudson Valley.

The town is called Chosen and the school Saginaw, fictional in reality but filmed on location. The gray and tan color palette of the film make many scenes look like Hudson River school paintings and George Inness landscapes. Which is appropriate, as that is primarily what George teaches at the college. Or, rather, that's what he is purported to teach; we never see him successfully deliver a lecture. But we do see his conversations with his department chair Floyd DeBeers, and we hear from other faculty that George has developed a popular following amongst his students. George is different from the insular faculty, however, as revealed in his first dialogue with the chair: "I guess I'm a bit of a cliché, the New York cynic," says George to his department chair upon his arrival, "that how a painter as brilliant as Inness could fall for some 18th century mystic still baffles me." Floyd, played by an always delicious F. Murray Abraham, responds, "Well, Swedenborg wasn't just some mystic. He keenly understood that everything in the natural world has a counterpart in the spiritual realm. And Inness painted landscapes with this in mind." 

And suddenly, the horror creeps in. Not in any visceral sense, mind, but more like those meditative movies on the boundaries between life and death, memory and illusion (I thought more than once of The Little Stranger, A Ghost Story, and even The Others). "After all, we're in Headless Horseman country," says one of the locals, making me wish this film went a little more gonzo into the mysticism of the region. But Catherine experiences more than her fair share of bumps in the night. She follows ethereal lights around the house, smells fumes, hears creaks. She discovers strange relics like a family Bible that has damned deceased women, and a blood red ring. And, worst of all, she is sure a ghostly woman is trying to make contact.

A suddenly isolated Catherine is desperate to make her own community, rather than simply being grafted to George's new collegiate network, but runs into considerable hurdles. Ladies at the historical society whisper about her house, which is featured in a painting at the gallery. Two neighbors, the young Vayle brothers, swing by while Catherine is alone to offer their help, but it seems clear they have other intentions as well. And while Catherine's wide eyes and seeming determination to remain in the house might indicate a weak or masochistic woman, by the halfway point it is quite clear that she welcomes the haunting, hoping to bridge the divide and help the restless spirits if she can.

There is a bit of a hooking opening scene when George (we don't know he's George yet) drives up to a bleak farmhouse in 1980 and notices blood dripping from the garage ceiling; he hurries in to see his young daughter all alone. That's all we get, and there's no context before the film cuts back to the previous spring. Could the child be a murderer? Could the house be haunted? Could the mother be crazy? It's a cheap ploy at the beginning of any film, making us aware of impending doom without earning it, but here I'd say it doesn't hamstring us or infantilize us like in other movies. Because this picture takes quite a while to gain any semblance of momentum -- and because the flash-forward opening is a bit of a red herring -- I'd wager most viewers need some kind of hook so they know it's all going somewhere.

(Now entering spoiler territory!)
As is often the case in Gothic stories, the real horror of this film lies in its depiction of a nuclear family falling apart. George, for all his charm, is a narcissist and pathological liar, the archetypal man who makes his name through charisma and a keen ability to steal the accomplishments of others (The Wife, Big Eyes, and so many more). The reveal is painstakingly slow, but once you see his true nature -- first hinted when he flirts with a student -- it's hard to look away. His is the grand tradition of husbands who gaslight their wives in isolated, Romantic houses. His façade slowly breaks down, and by the climax of the film, he embarks on a terrifying (if contrived) spiral that leaves body after body strewn in his wake.

The joys of the film, apart from its somber pacing and deliberately evocative aesthetic, largely stem from Seyfried, who allows Catherine to slowly develop into a caring and sensitive woman who nevertheless cultivates her own furious righteousness. And while her conclusion is deeply frustrating to me (I felt similarly unsatisfied with the protagonist's end in Promising Young Woman), the aftermath of it here finally grants her the female security and community for which she has longed. It helps, too, that her burgeoning agency and volatility (Midsommar) makes her arc dynamic and her ending strong for people trying to poke holes in her flawed but admirable character. And then there's George's colleague Justine, an "adjunct weaving professor" played by Rhea Seehorn, who steals every scene and made me wish the movie featured her more. Then there's the end, which is about as consummate a work of art as you could ask for, though I would have preferred a film about the ties between art, life, and death to be a little more fleshed out before such a sudden and iconic finale.