Things Heard and Seen review – moody Netflix ghost story fails to haunt
To the annals of Bad Movie Husbands, let us add George Claire, the contemptible academic assayed by James Norton in the starchy new Netflix joint Things Heard and Seen. He checks every box on the list of tropes associated with silver-screen college professors: bookishly handsome, sure, but also self-absorbed, pretentious, entitled, condescending to his wife Catherine (Amanda Seyfried), and overly familiar with the student body’s bodies. Not to mention that he hustled his spouse and their daughter into a move from New York City to a farmhouse tucked away in the wilds of upstate for a gig at the tony Saginaw College rather hastily, and under shadowy circumstances. Plus, everyone who gets on his bad side seems to wind up vanished or in a coma. That he’s up to something isn’t even a question – it’s only a matter of how deep his evil runs.
He’s the most malevolent force in what technically qualifies as a haunted house film, an oddly angled inflection on the mini-genre in which the intrusive specters may have plans of their own and death may not be the worst thing in the world. Catherine feels like a hostage in her own home, and though the ominously buzzing nightlights and hallucinations of bloodied mutant fetuses in the kitchen sink drain aren’t helping her fragile mental state, they’re not the real sources of menace in her life. Like a trusted confidante urging her out of a bad relationship, the supernatural elements complement and comment upon the primary plot thread of her curdling marriage, rather than terrorizing for their own sake. She begins the film in thrall of his toxic influence, internalizing his offhanded criticisms and expelling them in the form of bulimia during her first scene. By the conclusion, she’s achieved a grisly form of freedom.
The pedigree of co-directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, Oscar nominees once upon a time for their American Splendor screenplay, would suggest that they recognized a worthy concept in Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear when they took the job adapting it. And yet their dull-edged filmmaking overcooks any clever novelty of the original text in potboiler waters, until it’s all but indistinguishable from the dashed-off horror-tinged thrillers Netflix pumps out en masse to fill their library. Regardless of the greater significance attached to the actions each character takes, their motivations and outcomes announce themselves well in advance to destroy any attempted sense of mystery. Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it.
The thin tertiary characters existing solely to nudge the plot this way or that have a way of laying out their whole fate within moments of their first appearance. The second a strapping young local boy (Alex Neustaedter) stops by to offer his services as a handyman and make googly eyes at Catherine, we know they’re going to bone, in the same respect as when George stops to briefly chat Caravaggio with comely undergrad Willis (Natalia Dyer). In the case of either of George’s colleagues, whether that’s the friendly and paternal department head (F Murray Abraham) or his more skeptical peer (Rhea Seehorn) who bonds with Catherine, it’s a given that they will ultimately be dispatched for standing in George’s way. The script arranges itself around his nefariousness and his wife’s response to it, making the myriad subplots into distractions from the trashier intrigue we should be pursuing.
Catherine’s investigation into her home’s morbid past similarly accomplishes little beyond gumming up the works and elongating the run time past the two-hour mark. All the possibly cursed rings and visions of early 20thcentury family discord hang on the acrimony between the central couple like ill-fitting clothes, what should be an ambiguous presence made to resemble the standard paranormal activity. The notion of permeability between our plane and the next, spelled out in an epigram title card from theologian Emanuel Swedenborg musing on mortality, does supply the film with a strange and ballsy “so, uh, here’s this!” sort of ending.
But that scene, wondrous and inexplicable and charged with the primal power of the natural world, only serves to remind an audience that they’ve spent the preceding film accepting less. Focus and economy, two qualities sorely lacking in Berman and Pulcini’s approach to the material, could’ve gotten this uneven effort to do something fresh with a hidebound mode of horror into working order. As is, they stop short in places and go overboard in others, resulting in a misfire diverting only in fits and starts. Catherine spends the first half of the film feeling trapped in a roomy yet empty space, wanting more and frustrated that she’s not getting it – a feeling the viewer comes to sympathize with all too well.
Things Heard and Seen is now available on Netflix
to know, in a national magazine, that I was a “cunt” and a “piece of shit”. The words rose off the page like some kind of twisted Magic Eye picture. Yes, this was about me; I was the bad guy.
As journalism has become ever more dominated by celebrity, public figures have also become more willing to engage with criticism of their work, pushing when they don’t agree with something. When the singer Lizzo was underwhelmed by a 2019 album review by Pitchfork’s Rawiya Kameir, she wrote in a now-deleted Tweet that “PEOPLE WHO ‘REVIEW’ ALBUMS AND DON’T MAKE MUSIC THEMSELVES SHOULD BE UNEMPLOYED.” Her reaction is, on one hand, understandable: who wants to be criticised? And yet it fundamentally misunderstands what culture writing and criticism is. It is not there to take pot shots at Lizzo, or anyone else: it’s a place for fans to engage with forms that they love; to be excited and disappointed; a place for differing opinions.
In this case, Kameir deftly situated the album in the canon of overly slick empowerment pop, and conceded that it “performs an important social function”. She considered it, explained it, and treated it seriously, like the art that it is. She wrote that Lizzo is talented; she looked for the positives. However, it was seen as something more devious, more calculating. The stereotype of a critic as cruel, immoral and even underqualified (perhaps best encapsulated on film by the restaurant critic Anton Ego in Ratatouille), rather than someone trying to contextualise, parse, and make sense of what they see, is a pervasive one.
When the Buzzfeed writer Anne
Helen Petersen wrote in great detail about how the career of now-disgraced film star Armie Hammer had been stuck in second gear for a decade, Hammer called her “bitter AF”. In the same year, Lana Del Rey took umbrage with the music critic Ann Powers of NPR for saying she was embodying “a persona” (who doesn’t?), and that her lyrics were “uncooked”. Those were, of course, just Powers’s words. But to Del Rey, they had struck a nerve. She told Powers not to call herself a fan of hers ever again. In all of these cases, by shouting about them, the person with the actual power – the artist, the celebrity – ironically brings more attention to the critic’s views (see: the Streisand effect).
Of course, there are times when criticism tips into something more controversial. A review of Dolly Alderton’s book Ghosts went viral online in 2020. There wasn’t that sense of the reviewer having engaged with something before offering up a short, sharp, maybe flippant take. Rather it seemed over the top; the book, said the Irish Times writer Barry Pierce, brought him “nothing but pain and disappointment”. The editor-in-chief of Empire magazine, Terri White described it as “taking great delight in destroying for effect”. While I do not believe it shouldn’t have been published – as I said, I do not agree with probably 99.9% of what I read – I don’t know that it was the most informative kind of review. If criticism is an art, then this was a bad example.
Likewise, when Carey Mulligan clashed with the film industry magazine Variety over a review describing her get-up in the film Promising Young Woman as “bad drag” and adding that “even her long blonde hair seems a puton”. Should it have been published? I think you know my answer. But does Mulligan’s appearance have anything to do with the review? Probably not enough to warrant inclusion. Yet, it all comes back, I think, to the question of intent. “I’m a 60-year-old gay man. I don’t actually go around dwelling on the comparative hotnesses of young actresses, let alone writing about that,” said its author, Dennis Harvey. I don’t think Harvey should have been talking about Mulligan’s appearance because, honestly, why? But that potential to say something that someone won’t like is inextricably baked into being a critic. Many writers I know don’t read the comments below their pieces for the same reason.
If we don’t give our true opinions, what kind of job are we doing? A colleague recently told me about one of the first reviews they had written, and the publicist who phoned them in a strop to get a star rating changed, assuming that the editor – whom they had worked with several times before, and would happily go for a pint with – would give in (they didn’t). I would happily enter into a dialogue with most people about my work – and have done, many times – but, really, who is going to do that on a public forum, especially when they are being told they’re trash?
Alison Herman, writing in The Ringer in 2019, described the present moment as “a time when the public is disconcertingly unaware of the function of a vital civic institution like a free press, a misunderstanding that’s frequently exploited for political gain. Fashion bloggers and music critics are not investigative journalists, nor are pop stars and comedians fear-mongering leaders. But they’re channeling a deeply troubling trend in how the public exaggerates media members’ power, just as that power – such as it is – has never been less secure”. As well as being insecure, criticism is still predominantly dominated by people of the same race, social class, gender and sexuality. Being different in any – or several – of those ways, does not usually a thick-skinned critic make. Your impostor syndrome has, of course, told you that you’re not good enough long before anyone else could get in there.
I left the festival feeling depleted, and – when the tweets arrived – confused about whether a handful of drinks tokens were really supposed to have secured a glowing review. I drained my blisters and got far, far away from Twitter. Unlike the founder – and the famous writer of an acclaimedcrime drama – I knew it was best not to take criticism to heart.
Culture writing is place for fans to engage with the things they love; a place for differing opinions
The early days were TV-special cutesy – excerpts of the Temerlins’ home videos collected in Lucy the Human Chimp show Lucy in a diaper, cuddling her parents, eating oatmeal with a spoon, traipsing about the living room. “We wondered how chimp she would turn out to be, or how human?” Maurice Temerlin’s journal entry reads in voiceover. The tragedy is barely concealed – to no one’s surprise, Lucy’s captivity became increasingly untenable with age. The “loving family home”, Jane Temerlin laments in voiceover, became “impossible for her to live in as an adult”. (Jane was interviewed remotely for the film; Maurice Temerlin died in 1988).
Parkinson believes, however, that the Temerlins “best intentions are borne out by the fact of how they viewed Lucy as their daughter. They genuinely loved her as their daughter. And they tried to do right by her and put her life right subsequently.”
“It took a lot of persuading for her to talk about it,” Parkinson said of a remote interview with Jane, as it’s “an extremely emotional subject” for both her and Carter. “I think it profoundly affected them in good and bad ways. And it’s a kind of thing they haven’t really absorbed, they haven’t really gone into great detail with it within themselves since it happened.”
The Temerlins and Carter wanted Lucy to be “independent, free, to have choice,” Carter recalls in the film, but it was tough, almost unfathomable going. The film’s final half dramatically recreates Carter’s time on the island (played by Lorna Nickson Brown), which she only left, by boat, every few weeks for supplies. (The reliance on dramatic recreations and Carter’s interview became necessary, according to Parkinson, once Covid lockdowns precluded further interviews with experts, academics and other figures in Carter’s life.) Carter had no camping and minimal outdoor experience; she once found a rat decomposing in the water supply she’d used for days. The chimps were dependent on her leadership for food and emotional support. Frightened and confused, they slept above her mosquito net canopy during the early months, fearfully defecating on her bed at the unfamiliar jungle sounds.
The group adjusted, survived, melded as a family untethered from human measures of the passage of time. “I don’t know if I ever became a chimp, so to speak,” Carter says in the film. “But I do think that our personalities and our cultural tendencies all met together at some point and we were just who we were.” Carter only left when a male chimp, an offspringlike figure, attacked her as an assertion of primal dominance. She set up shop across the river, and later returned one more time to visit Lucy, who embraced her tightly, a moment captured in an iconic, tender photograph. Weeks later, a search party found Lucy’s scattered remains on the island, cause of death unknown.
Carter stayed in the Gambia, working in chimpanzee rehabilitation as the island’s population bloomed to over 100 chimps. At the film’s close, she recalls the deep feeling of inner peace and interconnectedness that coursed through her years on the island, sacred moments recalled by the beauty of each sunset. “How often do you get a chance to live like that today?” she asks. Then, mirroring many a clip of Lucy, she covers her eyes with her hands.
Lucy the Human Chimp is available on HBO Max in the US and on Channel 4 in the UK