By J.E. Warren
Contributing Writer
In What Lies Beneath, Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford play happily married characters who have just moved into their new home on a beautiful lakeside in Vermont.
The wife has a daughter from a previous marriage who is going away to college as the movie begins. The husband in a driven, respected geneticist and workaholic.
Once a concert cellist, Pfeiffer's character is now turned lonely housewife in a big empty house with peculiar — and noisy — neighbors who appear to be a dysfunctional couple.
In all of her spare time, Pfeiffer becomes convinced through suspicious spying that one of the neighbors has murdered his significant other, and comes to believe that her ghost is attempting to communicate. When the woman is found to be quite alive and well, Pfeiffer becomes an emotionally wrecked girl-who-cried-wolf, as it seems that someone's ghost still wants something.
A psychiatrist can't seem to fix her problems, and her busy husband begins to lose patience with her and her unbelievable story. Meanwhile, images of the ghastly specter continue to haunt her and disturb objects within the house.
Sounds pretty creepy, eh? It is, despite being panned by critics.
It's obvious to even an average movie-goer like myself, that with Beneath, Director Robert Zemeckis was paying homage to classic master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
The "bathtub scene" in this movie makes Psycho's "shower scene" look like milk and cookies.
In parts, I could sense that the main actor and actress were almost constrained — through no fault of their own — by a script conspicuously brewed from a most Hitchcockian formula. Without giving away too much (as if the movie trailers already haven't), I will say that while the movie remains largely unpredictable, there are times when its homage to the master borders on clear imitation.
All the same, many in a scared and satisfied audience gave the movie applause at its end. While walking out of the theater, I heard more than one person commenting on how Beneath is one of the creepiest, scariest movies they'd ever seen.
Don't listen to the critics. What Lies Beneath is worth paying full price to see on the big screen.
