The spirits of the dead wives are trying to break the pattern of violence which keeps recurring in this possibly cursed house. For her part, Catherine is frustrated with George, but curiously unafraid to challenge him, even when he starts to become physically controlling. Even the townie girl George takes as a mistress is unimpressed. We’re repeatedly told that George is charming and popular with his students, but the filmmakers decline to show him charming anyone he switches from unctious social climber to chortling fratty menace, alienating Floyd, and butting heads with Justine (Rhea Seehorn), a whimsical weaving professor who takes a protective interest in Catherine. Obviously, this bodes ill for Catherine, whose own husband is rapidly unraveling. Murray Abraham), the kindly Spiritualist college dean, turn up a series of dead wives murdered by their husbands in Catherine’s home, their deaths hushed up by a complicit community. We’re left with little to do but wait to find out who they are.Ĭatherine’s trips to the local historical society and burgeoning friendship with Floyd (F. The ghosts, depicted in singularly uninspired special effects, are real. Things Heard and Seen takes no interest in this aspect of the supernatural Catherine is sane. These unreliable narrators have gone out of fashion in the era of Believing (the right kind of) Women, but they offer rich material for a film, revealing the degree of subjective interpretation embedded in our day-to-day perception of the world around us. It’s an exceptionally bad choice for supernatural horror - after all, what’s a haunted house without a haunted woman living in it? Dead Wives Clubįrom The Innocents to the greater and lesser adaptations of The Haunting of Hill House, the best ghost stories embrace the ambiguity of a protagonist who might be witnessing supernatural events, or may be inventing them in her misery. It signals to the audience “this is a woman in distress,” while side-stepping all the ugliness that her illness entails for fear that viewers may not empathize with a woman who is truly struggling. The portrayal of Catherine’s eating disorder echoes the exhausted trope of the Troubled Lady Drinker, who leans heavily on booze without ever getting DT or a swollen face. Naturally, the more visceral physical symptoms of bulimia are also absent wouldn’t want this horror movie to gross anybody out, afterall. An eating disorder is not merely stepping on a scale and frowning at the number - it’s a miserable and all-consuming obsession, but the self-loathing that drives Catherine to starve herself is not evident in Seyfried’s (very likable) performance. Her eating disorder is used throughout the film as a plot device and a means of driving conflict with George, yet it remains set-dressing, superficial. We first see Catherine as she sneaks away from a party to vomit up a single bite of cake. She is as ambivalent about the move as she is in her relationship with the entitled George, and tensions between them rise as Catherine begins to notice signs of another presence in their new home. Catherine gives up her job and her life in Manhattan when her husband George (James Norton) secures a teaching position at a small liberal arts school in the Hudson Valley. Things Heard and Seen, Netflix’s adaptation of Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear, offers a supposedly feminist spin on the ghost story, concerning the fate of Catherine Claire (Amanda Seyfried). Ladies, is it feminist when a woman is brutally murdered? I assumed we were all on the same page, but recent releases have left me wondering.
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