Unbalanced and unidentified
"Things Heard and Sin"... Weak and lost between horror and fantasy
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Things Heard & Seen - a Netflix original, based on a novel whose title is worse than the title of the movie All Things Cease to Appear, by Elizabeth Brundage - a lost wanderer whose identity we do not know.
He hints that it is a crime movie, then turns into a social drama about a wife who sacrifices for her husband's future, then delves into the horror of the haunted house, using some of James Wan's spices, then turns into something like a children's play, the viewer yawns and wonders what next!
If the horror elements in the movie aren't scary, why should we care?
It is clear that it is not horror and has nothing to do with fear movies, but rather classified as a marketing ploy and there is no other justification.
The film is a marriage breakdown drama, and is more convincing as a marriage drama than horror. The film was written and directed by married couple Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who made the hit movie "American Splendor" in 2003.
All the elements of horror are familiar: an old house, crackling wood in the background, there's a secret in the house, and shadows or a figure that suddenly appear in the corner, but the duo's directing avoids focusing on horror in a way that may surprise the viewer, which suggests that the film is not horror in the first place .
The film begins with a man driving his car into a wooden house in the winter of 1980. As soon as he stops in the garage, he notices a drop of blood falling on his windshield. He rushes into the house and sees his daughter playing alone in the living room, and realizes that something big has happened.
Flashback to that spring, a man named George (James Norton) and his wife, Catherine (Amanda Seyfried), celebrate their daughter's birthday in their New York apartment.
They seem happy with a promising future, as he is an assistant professor of art at a university and she is an expert in restoring paintings. The house that George bought is of the type used in horror films, it was built in the 18th century and of course isolated, and all the residents of the small town are talking about, from the supervisors of the historical art hall, To the two boys who offer to help Catherine to fix it, they clearly have an intention.
Catherine finds it difficult to settle in the house, and there is a piano in one of its corners, and Catherine asks: What made the former residents of the house abandon something of this size and value in the house?
Then you begin to see abnormal phenomena and these phenomena are mixed with disturbing nightmares.
The lamp goes out and lights up quickly, the electricity goes out and comes back on, and lights suddenly appear and pass on the wall and the windows, and despite all this we see the heroine’s reaction very normal, she is surprised and then gets used to it and knows in herself that this thing does not seek to harm her.
Hence the viewer knows that he was deceived, and that the film is definitely not a horror. There is a scene of Catherine with Floyd, the professor with whom her husband works (Almighty F. Murray Abraham - the reader may remember him as Salieri's iconic court composer in the 1984 film The Masterpiece Amadeus), discussing in The matter of strange phenomena, and Floyd tells her that they are good souls that do not harm anyone, and she responds to him that she felt so!
After this scene, we see clips in which the good souls whisper to Catherine, and here the film abandons what its makers see as horror and enters the fantasy Fantasy, and the truth is that we have no problem with imagination, but our problem from the beginning is that the movie refers to itself as horror.
In the fantasy scenes, the film addresses the mentality of children or those who are immersed in the fantasy category, and again, we do not blame the imagination, but we blame the film's poor treatment of it, the reason is that the imagination here does not attract the viewer's attention and his mind does not accept it.
In other words, the movie is unbalanced. If we ignore the imagination, you will find a marriage drama destroyed because of the husband's narcissism, his constant lies, and his betrayal of his wife with a student. George is a character that changes dramatically from a meek pregnancy to a person who may be a danger to society. His character alone is enough to carry the film, not those lives.
As George changes, Catherine changes too, from an obedient wife who sacrifices for her husband to an angry woman who discovers his lies one by one. If we focus on this side of the story without the good spirits nonsense, we must have had a better movie.
The best phrase to describe the movie is “a missed opportunity.” There are things that do not make sense, for example, if a man kills a woman he loves with an ax!
How do the police come to the stupid conclusion that the victim was killed as a result of armed robbery!
Where are the loot?
And how did the thieves leave the woman's ring on the ground if it was easy to steal it?
It's clearly a crime of passion, but the police in this movie are incredibly stupid.
A professor forged a diploma to enroll in a university, and this alone is an interesting story, there is a husband hiding secrets, and there is a crime in the river although it is easy to predict, but the film directors are busy with good spirits who want to help Catherine, and this is what strips the story of any importance and becomes trivial.
Do we care about weightless souls or personalities of flesh, blood and emotions?
This is a poor movie and it is best to avoid watching it.
• He hints that it is a crime movie, then turns into a social drama, then enters the horror of the haunted house, then turns into something like a children's play, and the spectator yawns.
• The best phrase to describe the movie is “a missed opportunity.” It is a weak movie that it is better to avoid watching.
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