Things Heard & Seen
Netflix | Release Date (Streaming): April 29, 2021 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
49
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 24 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
15
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
83
The PlaylistAndrew CrumpApr 29, 2021
Rich filmmaking, from assured camerawork to tactile set decoration, is the film’s basis. But richer exploration of theme and spiritual belief is its design. Things Heard & Seen isn’t elevated. It’s just mature, wonderfully made, and, whether dead or alive, human. Read full review
77
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzApr 29, 2021
While there are the requisite number of jump scares and red-herring narrative fake-outs, Berman and Pulcini – who are odd fits in the first place, given their decidedly non-genre filmography – zig where you expect them to zag. Read full review
75
The Film StageDan MeccaApr 29, 2021
Offering plenty left to discuss and ponder by the film’s end, this is a haunted house thriller with a good deal on its mind. Read full review
74
PolygonTasha RobinsonMay 1, 2021
The ending is a bold play in a movie full of bold plays, but it seems designed more to whip up discussion than to draw the narrative together, or to give viewers either a horror-movie catharsis or a marriage-drama resolution. Read full review
70
Wall Street JournalJohn AndersonApr 29, 2021
There is a bit of gore toward the end of Things Heard & Seen that seems gratuitous, like a bone thrown to the genre audience. But it also points out how smart the film has been for so long, and so allergic to clichés, while still being satisfyingly scary. Read full review
63
Vanity FairRichard LawsonMay 5, 2021
The real trouble of the film is that it is stuck, like a spirit, between spaces. It’s cramped in the liminal room between “prestige horror” and something more slick, squalid, and satisfying. The balance is off, for which a strong cast—Rhea Seehorn is particularly sharp as a colleague of George’s—and stately aesthetics can’t make up. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comChristy LemireApr 29, 2021
Things Heard & Seen is partly a Gothic horror movie and partly a portrait of a marriage falling apart. It’s more effective as the latter than the former, but by the end these two seemingly separate kinds of movie dovetail in a way that’s surprisingly clever and effective. Read full review
63
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiApr 29, 2021
Things Heard & Seen is an adequate haunted-house film, to be sure, but it will certainly give you pause about that three-bedroom, three-bath listing in Kingston. Read full review
58
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattApr 29, 2021
The movie marches on in grim, silly lockstep to its themes: a compendium of jump-scare terrors almost exhaustively heard and seen, but rarely calibrated to make you feel much of anything at all. Read full review
50
San Francisco ChronicleChris VognarApr 29, 2021
Based on Elizabeth Brundage’s 2016 novel All Things Cease to Appear, Things Heard & Seen is a slow burn, and it spends a fair amount of time strewing elements of other ghostly tales throughout the premises. But then it takes a turn, those elements gel, and the characters come into sharper focus. Read full review
50
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckApr 29, 2021
A well-cast and often entertaining but campy and sometimes obvious thriller starring Amanda Seyfried and James Norton. Read full review
50
Screen DailyFionnuala HalliganApr 29, 2021
The dynamics of the Claire family (whose daughter is rarely to be seen) are several layers more interesting than the plot, which makes it all the more disappointing when a film that has ballooned its running time with attempts at nuance then bursts into silliness. Read full review
50
VarietyOwen GleibermanApr 29, 2021
What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are clichés. Read full review
50
The Hollywood ReporterJon FroschApr 29, 2021
It's an odd match of a screenplay (adapted by Berman and Pulcini) that's too obvious, telegraphing rather than teasing out its twists, and direction that's overly timid; one gets the sense that the filmmakers are checking off genre tropes and tricks from a list instead of finding ways to invest them with fresh chills or shivers. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesNoel MurrayApr 29, 2021
While the cast is great, the milieu is vivid, the images are polished and the atmosphere is effectively moody, Things Heard & Seen fails to connect on a visceral level. Read full review
50
IGNEmily TannenbaumApr 29, 2021
I couldn’t help but feel like Things Heard & Seen would have been a much better film if they stripped away its ghostly elements in favor of everyday horrors that Pulcini and Berman nailed so effectively in its second act. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineChris BarsantiApr 29, 2021
Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night. Read full review
50
The A.V. ClubKatie RifeApr 29, 2021
Like many Netflix originals, Things Heard And Seen is the cinematic equivalent of a mass-market paperback, neither good enough to haunt the viewer nor bad enough to haunt the résumés of its cast and crew. Read full review
50
IndieWireDavid EhrlichApr 29, 2021
Berman and Pulcini’s movie feels as if it’s more haunted by unrealized potential than anything else. Read full review
50
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperApr 28, 2021
Things Heard & Seen has the requisite horror-movie look (deep shades of brown and orange, low camera angles, repeated glimpses of effectively creepy paintings and haunting photographs, religious symbolism everywhere) and Norton in particular is a hoot as just the worst person in the world — but still, Things Heard & Seen should be neither of those things. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneDavid FearApr 29, 2021
You applaud Seyfried for doing so much of the heavy lifting, and for once again proving that a close-up of someone looking unnerved is worth a thousand wonky exchanges. Still, not even she can keep the wheels from falling off when the second half tries to trade in gaslighting for ghosts and never finds the tone it needs to make the transition. Read full review
40
The New York TimesA.O. ScottApr 29, 2021
Rather than interweaving domestic drama, supernatural mumbo-jumbo and campus naughtiness, Pulcini and Berman lurch from one scene to the next, squandering scares and undermining the momentum of the story. Read full review
40
The GuardianCharles BramescoApr 29, 2021
Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it. Read full review
30
ABC NewsPeter TraversApr 30, 2021
You know a ghost story is a hot mess when it strands a stellar Amanda Seyfried and a top cast in a remote, country house haunted by toxic masculinity, dangling plot threads and nothing worth hearing or seeing. Read full review
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