April 30, 2021
George Claire (James Norton) was accepted as a professor of art history in a small college in Saginaw in the Hudson Valley, so he moved his family, wife Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and little daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger), out of New York City to live in a vintage circa-1800s house in the remote town of Chosen. While grappling with bulimia and loneliness, Catherine began to sense a spirit in the house after she found an old ring in the kitchen and wore it. She felt that the spirit was trying to warn her of something.
They would meet several new people as they adjusted in their new community. Mare Laughton (Karen Allen) was the real estate agent who sold them the house. Eddie and Cole Lucks (Alex Neustaedter and Jack Gore) were local boys who volunteered to do chore around the house. Floyd DeBeers (F. Murray Abraham) was the dean of George's college who had a fascination with the occult. Justine (Rhea Seehorn) was Catherine's new friend who first got sense that something was amiss in the Claire household.
Recent Oscar nominee (for "Mank") Amanda Seyfried did well to portray Catherine's vulnerability to deceit and her eventual realization of the web was trapped in. James Norton, I just knew as the randy dandy in HBO's ongoing series "The Nevers," really had a caddish vibe about him from the very start, you knew something was afoot as soon as you saw his face. It was great to see "Indiana Jones" actress Karen Allen and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham (for "Amadeus") back in action, but their scenes could have been better written.
The build-up of the crime thriller aspect was very slow and deliberately complicated by details that did not really go anywhere. Some characters did not really even need to be there at all, only serving as confounding elements and red herrings (case in point, the character of student Willis, played by Natalia Dyer). The horror aspects were very subtle and basic only, mostly just dark shadows and creepy music. There was only one scene of a seance to show us an overt manifestation of the ghost, but even that did not go too far.
The story was based on a novel "All Things Cease to Appear" by Elizabeth Brundage, adapted for the screen and directed by the team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini. It was a variation of a common plot about secrets and lies which reached a critical point and blew up in front of the people involved. With all the art (painting, piano, weaving) in the plot, I imagined that this could have been an eloquent novel. Berman and Pulcini tried to recapture this essence, but their cinematic interpretation fell short. 5/10.
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