Three things about James Norton are true: He’s handsome, he knows it, and he knows how to express his handsomeness as utterly loathsome. For the better part of “Things Heard & Seen,” the new film from Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, Norton imagines his face as an object well-deserving of a smack, or two, or five, but takes his time building up to punching bag status. Good-looking white men get away with everything. To do so, they have to use their good looks to seduce the people in their orbit through either charm or sexual magnetism. It’s how they shield themselves from consequences. Unfortunately for Norton’s character, George Claire, “Things Heard & Seen” hungers for consequences at any cost.
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George, newly minted professor, and overall renaissance man moves his family to the Hudson Valley at the film’s start: daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger) and wife Catherine (Amanda Seyfried), the latter reluctant but willing to sacrifice the life she’s made for herself in New York City to support her husband’s academic aspirations. They move into an old farmhouse in need of TLC, as befitting the “city folk moving to the country” cliché. And keeping with the film’s ghost story framework, the farmhouse is haunted as hell, and Catherine, empathetic and superstitious, takes an interest in its history as George revels in his new role as the hot teacher lusted after by age-inappropriate young women.
George is a real douchebag, and Norton makes him easy to like and easier to turn against, thanks to the cloud of smug floating about his head. “Things Heard & Seen” does the heavy lifting making the character into something more than a smarmy, sybaritic white boy; Norton fills in the cracks like so much mortar. The movie that exists outside of George’s periphery involves Catherine and her ever-mounting suspicion that there’s something “off” about her new home, and her efforts to discover exactly what “off” means, stymied at most turns by George, who dismisses her concerns as paranoia, at best, and a product of her eating disorder. “Things Heard & Seen” does Catherine the kindness and courtesy of neglecting the source of her bulimia. Its empathy outweighs any prying impulse.
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Better still, the film doesn’t ever give priority to George’s perspective. Berman and Pulcini invest strongly in Catherine’s point of view. Not a moment goes by where the audience must wonder if George is right, and Catherine truly is seeing things: When she walks past an empty doorway, then crosses by it again and fails to notice the grim specter standing in the previously open space, we know there is, in fact, a haunting afoot. Given that “Things Heard & Seen” uses gaslighting as a motif, the refusal to gaslight Catherine comes as not only a relief but a benefit because the dread of not being believed heightens when the objective of her belief is made into fact. There is a ghost. Catherine doesn’t see things. George refuses to see them as a self-described skeptic and blissfully ignorant asshole. So it goes.
“Things Heard & Seen” may qualify as “elevated horror” to the incurious, but the term applies unflatteringly to Berman and Pulcini’s work. If anything, they “elevate” the film above that obnoxious appellation by remembering at every turn that they are, in fact, making a damn horror movie. Family drama holds the center, but horror provides the Claire household with structure. George praises their new home for its “good bones.” He’s right, but not for the reasons he imagines. Sure, the house has a sturdy foundation. It’s also built on death, just as the film is built on a fascination with the dead, who make regular appearances by rocking unoccupied chairs, setting electricity on the fritz, or yes, by showing their faces. However, Franny often sees those faces from behind the cover of a safety blanket. The poor darling doesn’t realize that the ghosts are there for her sake.
Unlike so many haunted house movies, the spirits in “Things Heard & Seen” aren’t all evil by nature. In not holding back on visitations from beyond the grave, Berman and Pulcini give themselves breathing room to make specters into characters instead of one-dimensional antagonists. Catherine gets to interact with them meaningfully, which gives Seyfried opportunities to stretch out her legs and give her role pathos. (The dialogue given here could be sharper. “Damned,” she says upon finding an old Bible with the word “damned” written in bold on one of its pages, as if everyone in the audience needs their eyes checked.)
Catherine is alone, apart from Franny and the friends she slowly makes as she adjusts to her new surroundings: The Lucks boys, for one, Eddy (Alex Neustaedter) and Cole (Jack Gore), who offer their services as groundskeeper and babysitter, respectively, and Justine Sokolov (Rhea Seehorn), a neighbor and one of George’s colleagues, who sees through his misogynist bullshit as easily as Willis (Natalia Dyer), the young lass George creeps and beds despite her animus for him. He’s hot. She can’t resist. She still hates his guts, though, which again makes a nice pivot from expectations. Willis isn’t his mistress. She’s a lay to him, nothing more, but this cuts both ways. There’s only so much “Things Heard & Seen” lets George get away with, and only so much time given him to get away with it as the ghosts close in around the Claires.
Berman and Pulcini use the work of the American landscape painter George Inness, and the influence theologist Emanuel Swedenborg had on his art as a backdrop for their hauntings. Like his own father, Swedenborg believed spirits played a part in our everyday lives, and “Things Heard & Seen” weaves that belief into its plot. The result is gentle at times, scary at others, and altogether moving. Rich filmmaking, from assured camerawork to tactile set decoration, is the film’s basis. But richer exploration of theme and spiritual belief is its design. “Things Heard & Seen” isn’t elevated. It’s just mature, wonderfully made, and, whether dead or alive, human. [B+]
“Things Heard & Seen” arrives on Netflix on April 29.