Making a movie is hard. You need a lot of people putting in a lot of hours and there aren’t many guarantees of success.
There are a lot of reasons for a movie to be bad from laziness to sloppiness to shameless money grabs. Those movies are easy to kick.
Sometimes a movie is bad not because of a lack of effort, but because of a lack of talent. These movies are harder to kick because all that work put into creating something and putting it into the world is so much greater than the time it took me to watch it and rip on it.
But, here we are.
“The Things We’ve Seen” is not a good movie. Written and directed by T. A. Manchester, this tale of rural life is sort of a mess right from the very beginning as there’s some sort of armed standoff at a mill that is burning to the ground.
How this fire turned into a standoff is never explained, but some people get shot and the county’s only source of income burns to the ground.
The suspected ringleader behind the arson, Rayford Boem (Randy Ryan), manages to escape but leaves his family behind to become the town’s social pariahs.
His wife Ivory Joy (Shani Salyers Stiles) tries to hold things together with her two teenage boys Reagan (Jarrett Maier) and Neely (Noah McCarty-Slaughter).
Rayford is kind of a dirtbag, but his previous crimes seem to be nothing more than being a traveling musician, and how he turned out to be the prime suspect in an arson-turned-armed standoff never gets explained.
There’s a lot of working-class angst and heartache floating around, but the whole thing feels very unpolished and the performances are straight out of community theater.
Again, I applaud the effort, but there’s really nothing in “The Things We’ve Seen” that’s worth your time.
“The Things We’ve Seen” is not rated, but features mild violence, language, and adult themes.
