Metacritic reviews

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.

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.

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.

Berman and Pulcini’s movie feels as if it’s more haunted by unrealized potential than anything else.

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.

Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.

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.

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.

Berman and Pulcini bank on suspense, despite a queasy inevitability being the strongest thing this retread of the familiar has going for it.

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.