Things Heard and Seen

 Things Heard and Seen (Netflix 2021) is an okay ghost movie:  it delivers a few scary moments in its first hour and has an inventive, if predictable, script.   The movie demonstrates that the cable TV production companies have, by and large, run out of material.   The demand for new movies is insatiable and, so, companies like Netflix are forced to recycle variations on older better movies, faintly disguised by superficial elements that might seem new and different to someone who hasn't seen many motion pictures.  These surface elements create the impression that we are consuming something fresh and innovative, but, in fact, the narrative situations are generic and predictable.  The situation is something akin to the waning days of Hollywood Westerns when horse operas were set in Australia or the pampas of Argentina -- the fundamental plot is the same, but the scenery looks a little different and you have kangaroos instead of coyotes.but otherwise not much changes.  Hollywood, during its studio days, was a factory for turning-out hundreds of variations on well-established themes and marketing each of them as new and surprising.  There's nothing wrong with this paradigm if it is managed skillfully and Things Heard and Seen has good acting, a wicked undercurrent of satire, and excellent photography.  But the film is really just a mash-up of Kubrick's The Shining and Ari Auster's Inheritance, two much better movies that render the entire enterprise a little bit gratuitous.  Nonetheless, Things Heard and Seen is sufficiently entertaining, retains your attention, and has some amusing ideas and, so, it's worth watching if there's nothing better on TV.  Furthermore, my recognition that the picture is derivative is nothing that would surprise it's creators -- in fact, some scenes replicate sequences in the pictures that are obvious influences on the film.  The film makers (Robert Pulcineli and Shari Springer Berman) are, in effect, winking at you the whole time.

It's impossible to write about this sort of movie without revealing plot points that are supposed to be a surprise.  Therefore, proceed with caution.

The premise of the film is derived from The Shining.  A young married couple with a four-year old daughter move to a haunted house in upstate New York.  The husband and wife are troubled and their picture-perfect marriage is not what it seems.  Pretty soon, the ghosts in the house pick sides.  The husband is manipulated by an evil, domineering ghost who murdered his family -- this is the plot of The Shining.  The wife gets cozy with a friendly female ghost who was murdered by the evil husband.  As in the film Inheritance, the film demonstrates that ancestral evil is genetic in the sense that it gets passed down through the generations.  Marital discord resulting in murder has happened several times in the haunted  house -- during the late 19th century, during the 1960's apparently, and, at the time of the film's present established as 1980.  (It's inexplicable to me why the film is set in 1980 -- usually when a movie picks a time period before cell-phones and computers, the film maker is trying to avoid plot problems created by our era in which all information is instantly available.  In Things Heard and Seen, the characters have to research things in libraries and local historical societies and can't call for help when they are menaced.  But I didn't really detect much about 1980 that is integral to the film and had to keep reminding myself that the events in the movie are occurring 40 years ago.)

The film's first hour is its best -- after that, it devolves into predictable murder and madness.  And the film has one twist that is genuinely surprising, at least, until the viewer works out the dynamics of the plot.  The young husband, who is handsome and appealing, turns out to be a monstrous homicidal narcissist -- this is something we don't quite grasp during the film's first forty minutes or so when we are willing to give the roguishly attractive hero the benefit of the doubt.  But by the end of the movie he has become a slavering maniac along the lines of Jack Torrance in The Shining.  It turns out that the husband, George Claire (played by James Norton with a Kennedy'esque wave of hair over his brows) has faked a doctoral dissertation on the theme of the influence of Emmanuel Swedenborg on the American painter, George Innes.  He finds a college in a remote place in upstate New York where the 18th century mystic, Swedenborg, has not been entirely forgotten and, in fact, where his disciples still  hold seances  in his name.  Hired to teach art at this college, Claire begins seducing his students and has an affair with one of the (much younger) local girls.  Meanwhile, his wife, Catherine, an art restorer, is having problems with the ghosts in the house and suffers from isolation caring for the couple's nondescript (generic) four-year old.  She makes friends with an adjunct professor of weaving at the college and learns the horrific history of the farmhouse where she is living -- several murders spanning four or five generations.  The ghosts manifest in all sorts of ways and, at first, we think they're persecuting Catherine, although later it becomes clear that the lady ghost (or ghosts) in the house is, in fact, a protective spirit, a sort of guardian angel as Swedenborg would characterize the relationship.,  The ghost reveals George's lies.  Every time, he says something untrue, the spirit goes poltergeist and pitch crockery  against the wall acting as a kind of spectral lie detector.  When George takes his students on field trip to the Metropolitan Museum to view Hudson Valley School paintings, he runs into his former doctoral advisor who smells a rat.  The advisor tells George's boss, the kindly dean, Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham) that his new art professor is a fraud.  So George murders Floyd before he can fire him.  He also causes a serious accident, running the Professor of Weaving (who has become his wife's friend) off the road and almost killing her.  George is now taking counsel with the evil ghosts and they tell him to take an axe and... well, you can figure out the rest.  

The film has some eccentric, if interesting, trappings.  There are discussions of Swedenborg's theories about the after-life and some appealing imagery relating to the Hudson Valley School.  However, some of this material isn't really accurate and I would suspect that Swedenborg is spinning in his grave at the characterizations of this thought in the film.  George Innes is not really a Hudson Valley school painting -- he comes a generation later and is a sort of transcendentalist artist, very much an "odd man out" for most of his life.  Thomas Cole's three paintings "The Journey of Life" are not in the Metropolitan Museum but in the old New-York Museum.  On various occasions, the film's photography imitates either Thomas Cole or Innes with sometimes remarkable results.  The ending is unsatisfying if picturesque -- the villain simply sails his boat into a Cole painting and vanishes in an apocalypse of light and mist.  Amanda Seyfried plays Catherine, the wife, who has an eating disorder -- she's bulimic and the wicked George poisons her by putting drugs in her energy shake.  (Were there energy protein shakes in 1980? I don't think so.)  With her protruding eyes and scrawny physique, Seyfried looks almost identical to Sissy Spacek in The Shining.  (The director's make no effort to conceal the influence of Kubrick's film -- two tracking shots early in the movie channel the famous opening of The Shining in which Jack Torrance drives up the mountain pass to the Overlook Hotel.  As in The Shining, the child is the first to sense the presence of the ghosts in the haunted house and the little girl is about the same age as Danny in Kubrick's movie.)  There is some satire about academic standards -- the heroine's friend is an adjunct professor of "weaving".  Again, I'm not sure that colleges in 1980 were as free and liberal as they were to become later and the film's "me-too" style feminism is an artifact of a much later era.  Anxious to check all buttons, the film also decries homophobia as it existed forty years ago -- like the talented Mr. Ripley, the sociopathic George has stolen the identity of a gay better man, his uncle I think, who perished (possibly murdered by George) in a boating accident.  F. Murray Abraham came to fame playing an old man -- he was Salieri in Amadeus (1984)-- and he's still playing old men, here the Dean at Saginaw college.  Oddly, the actor gets younger with each year.  Here his character is a youthful 65 -- in fact, the actor is 81.