What Lies Beneath Review

 Suspense thrillers like to play on your fears and take you on an emotional rollercoaster of a ride. The success of the thriller lies in the execution of the suspense and that is what the picture, What Lies Beneath (2000), directed by Robert Zemeckis does in surprising and intriguing ways. Michelle Pfeiffer stars as Claire Spencer, wife of Dr. Spencer, a university research scientist played by Harrison Ford, who after becoming an empty nester begins to believe she is being haunted by a ghost in her lakeside home or at least she thinks she is much to the chagrin of her husband. What Lies Beneath opens as a slow-burning suspense thriller and then escalates into a dangerous game of cat and mouse between Claire and her supposed ghost that is a mixture of high-octane suspense and plain absurdity. 

 

 

The first hour finds Claire believing she is being haunted by a ghost in her lakeside home and Zemeckis implements scare tactics such as a picture falling off the wall to paint the mood he is going for here, which is eerie and disturbing. Harrison Ford’s Dr. Spencer character is at first willing to entertain Claire’s fears dismissing them as just nervousness post their daughter moving away to college, but he grows more and more upset and embarrassed by his wife’s obsession with the supposed ghost haunting their home. Claire at first believes that the ghost may be her neighbor who she believes to have been killed by her neighbor’s husband but it turns out to be a red herring and that leads her to an old newspaper story about a young college girl who has been missing for two years. As she begins to seek more answers to the things that aren’t adding up after deciding that she isn’t going crazy, the twists and turns that begin to develop intensify the nature of the conflict in the story in unexpected ways. 

 

 

Michelle Pfeiffer is a great talent and she and Harrison Ford make for an interesting couple. Harrison Ford brings a compelling nature to his characters that make you implicitly trust him and root for him and here he makes you believe in him as a down-to-earth academician devoted to his work while also dealing with his wife’s problems in the fallout of her dangerous car accident the year before. One of the problems is that Claire has no memory of much of the events surrounding that traumatic experience until they begin to slowly resurface. Since her husband is insistent that Claire put this ghost matter behind her with professional help, Claire much of the time turns to her confidant and best friend Jody, played by Diana Scarwid who helps to keep comedic relief in highly tense and awkward moments when Claire fully pursues her ghost theory. Claire's rediscovery about events surrounding her car crash the year previous lead her to discover that her husband had been partaking in an affair with a college student at the time and in fact it was the same college student that went missing. Jody tells Claire that she saw the two of them together, but something seemed off and not long after her accident happened, and her husband was so distraught at the thought of losing her that she couldn’t bear to confront her about it. 

 

 

Harrison Ford’s seemingly down-to-earth good wholesome character turns out to be a duplicitous scum bag that stepped out on his wife. He begs for wife’s forgiveness and naturally, she turns angry. After a time, she returns and finds him knocked out lying in freezing water in the bathtub as a result of a hairdryer accident. Claire rushes to help him and thankfully he makes a full recovery. Claire and her husband manage to rectify matters between the two of them and Dr. Spencer finally admits that he does believe that there is a ghost in their house and it is the student he had an affair with who he had broken things off with and who disappeared soon thereafter. They burn a lock of hair of hers that Claire found, and Claire later tells her husband she knows that she is gone from the house. Claire and Dr. Spencer move onward until something strange and startling happens that shakes the course of the movie and leads into the climax which is something all together thrilling but also absurd. 

 

 

Claire feels reconnected to the missing girl’s ghost when out by the lake and diving down into the lake she finds a box underwater. She opens it and finds the missing girl’s necklace and confronts her husband about it. This shakes him and he starts getting worried and starts changing his story very fast and tells her that Claire didn’t just disappear when he tried to break things off with her as when she came to him she was trying to kill herself and had taken pills and died in that very house that night. He tells Claire she was trying to ruin him and he wasn’t going to let his mistake ruin his and Claire's life so he buried the necklace underwater and put the girl’s body in her car and drove it to the pier and then pushed the car into the water. He claims to have realized his error in judgment, and just wants to put it all behind them and begs for Claire’s forgiveness. However, Claire insists that the girl’s body be brought up and hands him the phone. Harrison Ford’s character hesitates but eventually gives in and calls the police telling them he has information on a missing girl and to send an officer right away to his home. He tells her he is going to get changed. Claire is shocked by all of this, but something doesn’t seem right. She moves steadily up the stairs in the pitch black and goes for the phone and checks for the last number dialed while she hears her husband in the shower. The number comes up as information and not the police and her husband snatches her out of the shadows and reveals his true colors as a murderous creature who will do anything to protect his way of life. He resolves to kill his wife, because she won’t let the past go, by drowning her in the bathtub. He reveals to her that he murdered the missing girl and he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her but that isn’t going to happen now. What follows is a lot of high-octane suspense mixed with absurdity. It is somewhat eerie to see Harrison Ford become evil and with methodical precision set out to murder his wife and do so with a twisted sense of psychopathic humor. Claire’s doom isn’t quite met as the ghost of the missing girl comes to her aid and knocks Dr. Spencer’s head against the sink leaving a pool of blood. Claire fights to escape the bathtub but can hardly move due to the freezing water. She does finally make it out though but finds her husband’s body has moved. She moves slowly downstairs and sees his body on the floor and goes slowly for the phone in his pocket. She knocks something over and freaks out and flees from the house and tries to leave in her car but realizes she has the wrong key and goes for the truck. In the reflection we see Harrison Ford emerge and strike. The following sequence finds Harrison Ford having snuck into the truck, attacking his wife leading to a crash in the river. With a psychopathic demeanor, he determines to drown her but she is saved once again by the ghost who this time finishes the job. Claire survives but has been through a traumatic experience like no other after being hunted down by her daughter’s father who decided to end her life with ease after realizing his way of life would be destroyed. The climax of the film features a lot of suspense and a lot of it works but some of it doesn’t and comes off as laughable and absurd. I believe if the supernatural elements of the film had been removed and if the script, which was written by future Marvel alum Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson), focused on Claire psychologically coming to the realization her husband was a murderer accompanied by Zemeckis’s well-employed suspense elements the film would have been much stronger. 

 

 

 What Lies Beneath is by no means a perfect movie, with the uneven pacing and absurd laughability in the climax of the film, but the picture has plenty to make up for it. The stellar acting of Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer brings credibility and believability to the suspense that makes the payoff well worth it and creates a genuinely scary tone that allows you to truly care in the moments of high suspense when the unbelievable and totally logic-defying traumatic climax of Dr. Spencer played by Harrison Ford, who we know as likable characters such as Indiana Jones, Jack Ryan, and the wrongly convicted Dr. Richard Kimble turned duplicitous murderous psychopath, sets out to kill his wife and the fight for survival by Michelle Pfeiffer’s character is one well worth staying to the end to see. This is no doubt because of all the combined well-crafted cinematic elements under the expert direction of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump’s Robert Zemeckis drawn from a cleverly written screenplay by Clark Gregg effectively delivering a home-run character/suspense drama that isn't one thats easy to forget.

Score: B -