TEXAS, USA — Despite one character’s meager efforts at grounding it in logic, the primary reason your hairs will stand on end when watching “The Unheard” – a simmering horror-drama hitting now on the streaming platform Shudder – is something that can’t be explained.
That might not be saying very much for a genre that thrives on ambiguity. But in “The Unheard” supernatural concerns eventually reshape into personal ones in such a way that gives it reason for being even when it can feel like it’s merely tugging us along by the fourth or fifth time we’re seeing old videotapes become portals to screeching, undefinable netherworlds, like some aspirant blend of “The Ring” and “Poltergeist.” Yet by the end of the movie’s drawn-out conclusion it’s last year’s “Aftersun” that, against all odds, emerges thematically as the most appropriate companion piece.
Director Jeffrey Brown’s last movie, “The Beach House,” was a head trip that sourced its cosmic terror from the environmental. In “The Unheard” its comes from a technological place; the moments you’ll find yourself peering through your fingers come when Chloe (Lachlan Watson) is closely watching those unearthed home videos wrecked by distortion, peering through the broken images to find some sense of closure after her mother’s disappearance many years ago. It’s presumably been nearly as long since Chloe was at her childhood Cape Cod home; she’s returned after participating in a clinical trial to potentially restore the sense of hearing she lost as a young girl.
You can imagine how a horror movie might mine the conceit of a deaf protagonist for spooks. And though “The Unheard” gets in its own way early by pivoting back to full sound for conversational scenes – Chloe uses a phone app to pick up on others’ speech, and has no problem talking herself – the sound department deserves credit for the effectively displacing ambience it creates when Brown opts to limit the movie to Chloe’s perspective. Random noises are kept to a waterlogged hum, the camera toys with her spatial awareness and even the score is a barely-there drone that doesn’t necessarily pick up when the suspense does.
The effect conjures early tension over what shape terror will eventually take. Does the town’s barbed history of missing women mean “The Unheard” will become a set piece-structured stalker story a la Mike Flanigan’s “Hush”? Or does the suspiciously quick return of Chloe’s hearing signal something more extraordinary at play? The answers waver between eye-rollingly obvious and compelling elusive (the script is by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, who penned 2019’s “Crawl”).
But Brown’s direction has a patience which eventually pays off, like peering into a void that eventually creates a soundscape of its own: The movie’s use of quiet comes to be equally melancholic and menacing, and we start to recognize that in this story of a young woman trying to better herself emotionally and physically, empowerment can bring its own burden. After all, as horror aficionados well know, sound begets its own terrors: the howling of the wind, the mysterious creaks of decrepit homes, the anonymous screeching on the phone. Character work plays second fiddle to these tricks early on, but in its second hour “The Unheard” manages to churn out some notes of poignancy even as the delicacy of its filmmaking can start to feel like fluff. Its homestretch ties things together, though you would do well to recognize that Brown is often looking down at the line he’s walking between drama and horror instead of honing in on whatever destination awaits at the end of it.
This is to say that, unlike the aforementioned “Hush,” “The Unheard” is best suited for a specific horror audience that doesn’t mind following it up with a gentle night’s sleep instead of staying up in a cold sweat. The horror here stems more from deciphering the unknown – unknown sounds, strange whispers, nature-defying revelations – than what that unknown may do to Chloe. The effort is commendable even if its power is held back whenever Brown opts for stylistic repetition over evolution; every time Chloe becomes entranced by the home videos where the past seems to be reaching out to her through a symphony of static, we feel a little less intrigued and a little more annoyed. It’s satisfying when we begin to understand what’s happening to Chloe, but what the Rasmussens neglect is a sense that it’s her own agency that’s pushing the story forward.
“I’m hearing things,” our formerly deaf protagonist says at one point. I’m not sure if the movie recognizes the irony of the line, which gives you an indication of where its heart is at—or at least, where it ultimately finds itself. Amid its narrative shortcomings and plodding pacing, what emerges nonetheless is a movie about the difficulty of adapting: to deafness, to sound, to motherlessness, to newfound connection. Its final moments are its most viscerally cathartic; if you were able to adapt to the movie’s rhythms yourself, you might just feel the tug. In your gut, that is, if not on your nerves.
"The Unheard" is not rated. It's now streaming on Shudder. Runtime: 2 hours, 5 minutes.
Starring: Lachlan Watson, Michele Hicks, Brendan Meyer, Shunori Ramanathan
Directed by Jeffrey Brown; written by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen
2023
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