Things Heard & Seen

This is quite possibly the WORST edited movie to ever exist. So many cuts, its so choppy that it feels like each scene ends before it fully develops. The story is so weak and not compelling at all, think Amityville horror but very diluted. Amandas worst performance of her career, and the main guy is a terrible actor. Natalia dyers character was so pointless and so random that it wouldnt have mattered if she was in it or not. The kid is barely in it too, which i found very weird, as you find yourself not really caring about that character either. The husband isn't a compelling villain at all, we have no idea what really drives him to be a terrible person, he just randomly does bad things with no rhyme or reason. If i were to sum this movie up in three words it would be: random, anti-climatic and boring.

I really wanted to like this movie - it had a decent cast and the production values looked good- but there were SO many things in this movie that went absolutely nowhere! What was the point of her eating disorder? I was thinking maybe husband was going to use it against her to make her look crazy when she started catching on to his lies. Nope. Why did we bother getting to know the Willis character? If her only function was to illustrate that George was a jerk and expose the affair with the scarf toward the end, that could have easily been done with a nameless throwaway character that didn't confuse the plot. The boys who used to live in the house. Why were they so keen to come back? Surely they will be involved in the climax in some way. Nope. Most importantly, what was the point of the house being haunted???!!!! I assumed that the conversation that Catherine had with Floyd was foreshadowing that the ghost would end up helping her against her husband in the climax. Nope. She just let Catherine die. And then the ending comes from out of nowhere and was completely unsatisfying and pretentious. So no justice for any of the women in that house, as the real estate agent so aptly notes, and as far as anyone knows, George escaped and is living on a beach somewhere. This movie fails as horror, fails as a thriller, and fails as a cohesive drama. I'm not sure what it is. I gave it three stars because the actors did what they could with what they were given and the production values were decent. I am curious if the book makes more sense, but I will be mad if I read it and get more of the same.

I gave the first 2/3 of the movie a 5 star rating. I thought it had potential as the story unfolded, but, I have no idea why it ended up in the direction that it did. Totally took away from the movie. I gave the ending one star, for WTH?!?