“Things Heard and Seen” (Netflix, 04.30.21) gives horror movies a bad name. It’s the kind of bland genre exercise that belongs in the annals of ‘90s horror-dom instead of this decade where arthouse chills have re-energized horror with artful scares (“It Follows,” “Hereditary” and “The Invisible Man.”) Shari Springer Berman, and Robert Pulcini direct this dreck of a movie and it’s a real shame considering these are the same filmmakers whose indie roots reside in their incredible 2003 debut “American Splendor.” You won’t find any cinematic splendor in “Things Heard and Seen,” unless you’re interested in Catherine (Amanda Seyfried, who deserves a better script than this) reluctantly trading posh life in 1980s Manhattan for a remote home in Chosen, New York, after her husband George (James Norton) lands a job teaching art history at a college. The result is isolation, Catherine can’t cope with the remoteness of her new home, and then she starts sensing a sinister force lurking in the walls. Berman and Pulcini try to show parallels between Catherine and George’s failing marriage and the dark disintegration of their spooky new home. Seyfried, as always, is quite good, but there’s an underlying nothingness to the whole thing, a lack of substance that renders it obsolete just a few minutes into its runtime. Pulcini and Berman try very hard to make us jump out of our seats, but their excessive usage of low camera angles, creepy photographs, and religious symbolism has already been done to death in better movies.
SCORE: D