2023’s The Unheard is a curious beast in that it wants to be three or four different films. Unfortunately, it not only has insufficient connective tissue between those disparate elements, but it has barely enough material for a one-hour movie. Alas, the runtime of this is two hours, five minutes.
The plot is, ostensibly, about a young woman played by Lachlan Watson who has had incredibly diminished hearing since a round of meningitis when she was eight. Through an experimental treatment, a doctor played by Shunori Ramanathan helps her to restore her hearing through new nerve growth, which is supposed to be impossible.
The treatment begins with deliberately giving her a kind of ear infection, courtesy of stem cells implanted in her ear via a long probe. Why does the probe they’re going to put in her ear start from so far away? That make me uncomfortable for some reason, like it was going to miss her ear and go in her eye or something. And the CGI for the probe is unconvincing, and yet it still had me ready to avert my eyes from the screen.
It is no surprise Watson regains her hearing, a miraculous development that surprises even her doctor. This non-horror storyline is where the movie really shines, and suggests the best use for this material may have been a more conventional drama. Watson, especially, is a wonder to watch at first, as she does a great many simple things, such as running a faucet, just to hear those sounds again. This is in contrast to when we first see her arrive in the city on a bus, and all we hear on the soundtrack are the muffled rumblings that is her sonic perception of the world before the procedure. But then she hears a Nickleback song and wishes she was deaf again. I kid! I kid.
Alas, the film will work in supernatural horror elements, with her occasionally having what are initially dismissed as auditory hallucinations. In particular, these happen when she is watching the old VHS tapes from her childhood.
Those tapes are a thorn in my side. I’m sure these are only part of the plot because a generation born after the technology went extinct is so obsessed with it. I very much doubt anybody filmed Watson with a VHS camcorder at any point in her life as she doubtlessly was born after the format fell out of favor. And, of course, the tapes are ridiculously glitchy. I’m going to count that footage as the third movie this is trying to be, as it factors into the plot a great deal. And, as if I need to remind you, the plot is ostensibly about a young woman getting her hearing back, but the filmmakers somehow thought extensively working in visual media was relevant to that storyline. There’s even a character that, to the best I could determine, is killed partly through bad VCR tracking. That’s right—the video glitches even carry over into real life.
Movie four concerns the many women who have gone missing over the years in such a small community. It just so happens Watson’s mom suddenly disappeared from that area around the time of her illness. Related to this subplot about the missing women, we see a masked and gloved figure slash an unknown woman’s throat with a box cutter. This results in a preposterous spray of CGI blood that makes the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail look realistic in comparison, and less funny, in comparison.
There’s only two creepy guys around town, so the mystery comes to a coin toss for which of them is the killer. Nick Sandow is an old friend of the family and former police officer. Brendan Meyer is a former childhood friend of Watson’s, who has grown into a socially awkward young man with a bowl cut. Per Ebert’s law of the economy of characters, the killer has to be one of these two guys, and I felt no vested interest in which one it would be revealed to be.
It sounds like there is a great deal happening in this film, but it doesn’t hit many story points along the way. The long gaps in the progression of the story (stories?) left me too much time to wonder about the many annoying little quirks of this production. The main such problem I had was Watson’s dad, with whom she’s always conversing on the phone, but who never appears at the house. He never appears in person and her phone conversations with him add nothing. And, as I already mentioned, the videotapes were something I refused to accept. Then there’s the seemingly only commercial video tapes the family ever had, and that is a box set of films that should only be watched when they were skewered on Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to watch something like The Brain that Wouldn’t Die without the commentary over it.
But the biggest mystery of The Unheard is the editing. Almost every scene demands trimming, and many moments could have been cut entirely. Consider a scene where Watson drops in on Sandow at his office: we start on a shot from high up where we watch her car pull up to parking spot, then we cut to a shot at ground level as we see her pulling into the spot. It’s dross like that which pads out the film to its ridiculous length. Also, if I wanted to see a movie with such tedious parking scenes, I would watch a film remarkable for so many similar moments, one so ripe for mockery that I’m surprised it wasn’t among the VHS tapes she has, and that is Birdemic.
Dir: Jeffrey A. Brown
Starring Lachlan Watson, Nick Sandow
Watched on Shudder