Chloe Grayden undergoes an experimental procedure to restore her hearing. So she begins to suffer from auditory hallucinations related to her mother’s vanishing.
The second feature film from “Beach House” director Jeffrey A. Brown features a script from Michael and Shawn Rasmussen that could’ve used another edit round. While Brown’s directorial style always leaned heavily on moody obtuse characters exploring the world around them, this film stretches that aesthetic past its limit. What makes for a two-hour movie really fits about one hour of the story with another hour of retro-VCR aesthetic and aural creeping scares, both of which lose their potency before the three-quarter mark. While Lachlan Watson carries the film with their self-serious performance, the film could use a second round of edits overall.
Watson plays Chloe, a deaf woman who undergoes a procedure to restore the hearing she lost in childhood. When her hearing returns, sharper than ever, she begins to experience supernatural phenomena that may or may not be related to her mother’s disappearance while a serial killer stalks the streets of this Massachusetts off-season vacation community. Watson reconnects with childhood friend Joshua (Brendan Meyer) as her handyman Hank (Nick Sandow) visits from time to time to help her out.
“The Unheard” offers an intriguing premise and strongly represents deafness in the first twenty minutes. The world we’re embroiled in begs us to pay attention to the screen as sound is reduced to thumps and reverberations more than anything else. In fact, the film so faithfully sticks to that experience that it makes a meal out of her hearing later to great effect. Unfortunately, the film’s entire first half is concerned exclusively with Chloe’s well-being and only briefly drops a body to tell us something more is happening.
The film’s last half falls apart with too-long sequences and narrative switchbacks whose only purpose feels like extending the film’s runtime. When Chloe finally picks up on the danger around her, it’s too late for the audience. So much of the story unfolds linearly it’s easy to predict the ending. The serial killer, part of this story, feels like the most underbaked part of it all, and it holds the entire finale, rendering the film a far less satisfying climax than it deserves. What little tension there is, Brown holds together with lengthy synth shrieks than much else. When our heroine escapes the house of her would-be captor (a character we quickly surmise is the antagonist because the only other suspect rules himself out early on), she takes a victory lap returning to her childhood house and setting up another cat-and-mouse sequence. It’s the kind of retread that aches for screenwriting symmetry and unnecessary plotting and calls attention to itself. One more pass might have availed the Rasmussen’s to cut out some of the script’s noise and better hone in on the mystery.
What few things work well in this story Brown utilizes as a tool to break up audience tension. Chloe watches old VCR tapes of her mother on the family TV at night, listening to her mom’s voice for the first time in years, only for the tapes to fade to static and something on the other end trying to reconnect. Brown edited these sequences to feature every facet of TV static there is known to man, and its initial inclusion piqued my curiosity, but its usage in the dramatic finale actually blinded me and might have contributed to some hearing loss. Similarly, the use of sound (or its lack thereof) feels novel initially, but the sound design quickly devolves into bare minimum foley and heavy high-pitched whining. The finale drones in an ascending pitch for so long it grates. My ears were ringing by the time the movie was over.
Thankfully, star Lachlan Watson carries the film on their back with an impressive self-possession that few others could match. It’s a challenging role to have. These low-budget horror films ask so much from their leads. To make inane dialogue profound and enhance simple dramatic beats by sheer force will make or break an actor, never mind the fun chase scenes or throat-slashing. The simple day-to-day parts of the film can bog an actor down or make the movie feel parodic. Watson makes the film impactful by displaying woundedness throughout, even when Chloe celebrates the return of her hearing. In addition to Watson, fellow actor Brendan Meyer also makes the most of his role. Meyer waffles between unsettling and unsettled throughout the film. It’s the perfect performance for what could be a red herring or could be the killer. The two actors together make gold.
“The Unheard” rests on a familiar idea but tries to delve deeper into the experience of deafness. Unfortunately, it relies too much on tension to deliver more than its tried surprise-serial-killer turn. What starts as an aesthetic experiment quickly becomes a crutch as piercing sounds repeatedly grate on the audience’s literal nerves. The film will remain in the sinful category of ‘films marketed better than their actual stories.’
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