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What
Lies Beneath
(2000)
 What
lies beneath? Not much. In fact, director Robert Zemeckis
borrows so heavily from Hitchcock that this handsomely mounted
film plays more like a self-conscious compendium of the
master's greatest hits than an original supernatural suspenser.
Female hysteria has made for many a complex psycho-thriller,
from Rebecca to Rosemary's Baby, but this is
skin-deep material.
Claire Spencer
(Michelle Pfeiffer) seemingly has it all: a handsome
geneticist husband (Harrison Ford), a teenage daughter, and a
beautiful lakeside Vermont home that's just been renovated.
But when the kid heads off to college, Claire's faced with
empty-nest syndrome and has lots of time to peep through the
fence at the quarrels that frequently take place between her
new neighbors, the Feurs (James Remar and Miranda Otto).
Claire gradually develops a sneaking suspicion that Mrs. Feur
has been killed by her husband. (Does this sound suspiciously
like Rear Window? Wait until you see the creepy bathtub
set piece that's almost a shot-for-shot homage to Psycho.)
Ghostly clues accumulate: Mysterious whispers fill Claire's
home, doors creak open by themselves, the words "you
know" appear in the condensation on the bathroom window.
Afraid she's going loony, Claire consults an understanding
shrink (Joe Morton) and her kooky new age pal (Diana Scarwid,
in perfect best friend mode), but it becomes increasingly
clear she isn't delusional and as the truth unfolds, it
threatens to destroy her perfect marriage.
Clark Gregg's
script wastes no time in spooking Pfeiffer, but after a while,
the tension diffuses and the movie becomes a hollow pastiche
lacking even the broadest brushstrokes of character
development. Mainly, What Lies Beneath serves as a
visual showcase for Pfeiffer's still-porcelain beauty: The
more wet, harried, and horrified she gets, the more seductive
she is to watch. Yet for all her gasping, crying, and running
up and down steps, we get precious little insight into her
character's inner workings. We learn that Claire was a
Juilliard cellist who forsook her dreams and that her daughter
is the offspring of her first marriage — Ford's character is
a foster father — with no specific payoffs. Better
directors, from Hitch himself to Roman Polanski, would milk
tension from Claire's straddling the line between sanity and
madness, but we know she's not a nutjob from the get-go.
If the
film were a half hour shorter, it might work as a superficial
exercise in terror — there are a handful of fun,
jump-out-of-your-seat scares. But at 130 minutes, the film
leaves us with far too much time to do little more than
reflect on the overreaching performances of the superstar
leads (who used to make good movies) and Zemeckis' technically
superlative filmmaking. Assisted by the top-notch
collaboration of composer Alan Silvestri and visual effects
supervisor Rob Legato (Titanic), Zemeckis composes a
movie so self-assured that there's almost no room for
surprises. The director's best films are live-action,
genre-busting cartoons (Romancing the Stone, Back to
the Future); his worst are lachrymose spectacles (Forrest
Gump). What Lies Beneath falls into a third
category of his work, one best defined by Death Becomes Her:
inorganic cinema that substitutes special effects and camera
tricks for human drama. What Lies Beneath is
startlingly shallow even for a summer movie.
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