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Things Heard & Seen (2021)

My quick rating - 5,2/10. Time to let shuffle decide, I only picked the horror genre. I saw the Netflix logo but I have no idea if it is still playing on there. Oh, and a best-selling book as well. I have to assume that the book was far better than this was. Especially the ending which massively detracted from a decent slow-burn ghost story they were concocting. Which is part of the issue here. I have no idea why they even bothered trying to make it a ghost story. It never gets fully explored and the character's issues with one another throughout were doing just fine without the low-quality effects specters occasionally seen. They didn't look any better than a TV movie from 30 years ago. We have a woman (Amanda Seyfried) who relocates with her hubbie (James Norton) for work reasons but begins to think there are some dark issues going on in their marriage. Seyfried is actually quite good in her role here while Norton I thought the exact opposite. Now, this is where it gets muddled since they could've stuck with that and delivered on the acting and story. But then they mixed in the history of the house. Now I am always up for a good haunting so I was game except they never used it to the potential it had. An occasional description from a neighbor or something in a picture that correlates to an old story. Things like this are sprinkled in and then forgotten. She is a bolemiac? Naw, forget that having any significance. Affairs? Just quick eye candy, no development on that. Just a lot of lazy screenwriting. There are some subtle hints to a deeper haunting that I may have picked out like the cross in the photo or the slideshow error in class. Not really spoilers, more something to watch for since I am not sure if that has anything to do with the plot as a whole. But I am willing to bet these clues made more sense in the story that was told in the book. Maybe with this complete letdown of an ending, those hints were just unused material like those few things I just mentioned. But it looks nice for the scenery as expected on a Netflix budget it just doesn't deliver much more than an average story with an ending that is like a massive gut punch.

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