In short: Things Heard & Seen (2021)

I know that this overlong tale of marital trouble and visually really badly realized ghosts has quite a few friends among writers online and off, but I very much suspect it’s mostly those people hanging the term “elevated [insert genre here]” on perfectly innocent and great films, a group of critics I find myself very unkindly disposed towards. On a critical level, obviously; on the personal level, one shouldn’t loathe people one doesn’t know as if they were people to actually give one reasons to hate them in the life outside the mind. As happens often enough, I’m showing my age in my digression.

But back to the movie at hand. This thing must be one of the most bourgeois pieces of filmmaking I’ve encountered in a long time, one that clearly wants an audience that understands the sheer horror of being a failed artist having to have turned to teaching (gasp!), and not even getting a cushy job at Cornell (double gasp!) but having to teach at a more provincial (triple gasp!) place. And no, the film isn’t a Chabrol-style dissection of the kind of life that thinks that’s an actual problem an audience will easily empathize with but really seems to want us to nod sadly to the male protagonist’s plight. Female protag (Amanda Seyfried doing her best to make gold out of crap, as the poor woman so often seems to be tasked with, and really making her co-lead James Norton’s performance look even blander than it already is) has a vaguely defined eating disorder that’s so generically realized, nobody should ever confuse her with an actual human being suffering from such a thing.

Of course (unless you’re that kind of Marxist) you don’t need to skewer the bourgeoisie in your movie to use so deeply bourgeois characters as these, but if you want to go the other route, you really need to turn them into actual human beings with specific human character traits and sorrows other human beings not exclusively of their own class will believe in and understand. Unfortunately, specificity and depth are not the forte of director/writer duo Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini here at all. Characters are flat and feel nearly abstract in their lack of actual humanity; they’re there to make the impression of humans, that’s all.

Keeping to form, the supernatural parts of the film seem to be very proud of someone involved having read Swedenborg but do very little with their reading, instead using Swedenborg, his version of spiritualism and the ghosts (well) as the bluntest metaphors you an imagine, turning all of this into intellectual posturing with little more than the pretence of weight and depth.

Does it surprise that the film looks slick but is also devoid of any stylistic personality?