IMDb plot summary: The wife of a university research scientist believes that her lakeside Vermont home is haunted by a ghost - or that she is losing her mind.
Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford, Diana Scarwid, and Miranda Otto.
I was hopeful for this one. I like Michelle Pfeiffer and Harrison Ford, I like Robert Zemeckis, I like psychological thriller/horrors. This, however, was better in theory than in execution. The dialogue is pretty clunky, the acting is very over-the-top, and the final chase scene was pretty clearly supposed to carry the rest of the movie but went on for far, far too long and required way too much suspension of disbelief. The movie would have been significantly stronger if it had ended about 15 minutes earlier. Still not a strong movie, but stronger. It's a bummer it didn't work for me, because I do like the premise, and the mystery unfolds in an interesting way, but it is regrettably sloppy.
2 stars.
How it entered my Flickchart:
What Lies Beneath < Trainwreck
What Lies Beneath > Passion
What Lies Beneath < The Day of the Triffids
What Lies Beneath > Cinderella (1950)
What Lies Beneath > Saturday Night Fever
What Lies Beneath < Alice in Wonderland (1999)
What Lies Beneath > Marathon Man
What Lies Beneath < Legend
What Lies Beneath < Defending Your Life
What Lies Beneath < Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
What Lies Beneath > The Toy That Saved Christmas
Final spot: #1722 out of 2660.
1 comment:
I saw this at a second-run theater the night before Thanksgiving, 1999, in Clarksville, Indiana. It was the last showing they had of anything, so it let out after midnight, I think. It wasn't just that traffic was light; there wasn't a single semi between there and home, almost a good hour's drive, because they had all already reached their destinations and were being unloaded. It became outright eerie after awhile.
We had to cross the Ohio River. I have two phobias: heights and dark water. Having What Lies Beneath fresh on my mind made that crossing more daunting than it already would have been by default.
I'm not generally rattled by movies. I know too much about how they're made, so I'm often scrutinizing how a given shot or effect was manufactured when everyone else is jumping in their seats. (Having Harrison Ford be the bad guy was a deep personal betrayal, though, and that got to me!) But something about that long, empty drive home accentuated the film and by time I got home, I confess I was actually kind of spooked.
The next day, I will confess, I made my brother pull back the shower curtain before I would go into the bathroom to take my shower. I have no shame about this.
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