What Lies Beneath
March 2001 Reviewed by: Wes Marshall Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

First, a warning. If, like me, you are totally new to What Lies Beneath, DO NOT watch the trailer or the features first. I will try not to give away too much of the plot, which is more than I can say for the DreamWorks marketing staff. Both the HBO First Look and the trailer give away the entire plot, completely ruining all the carefully contrived suspense built up during the first half of the film. Be advised. Approach this movie as freshly as possible.

Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) and his wife, Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), have moved into his recently deceased father’s house. Almost immediately, very strange things start to happen. Director Bobby Zemeckis (Cast Away, Forest Gump, Back to the Future, Romancing the Stone) throws the entire horror-ghost movie textbook at us: doors open and close by themselves, things jump out at you, computers and stereos turn on and off. During the first hour, Zemeckis knits all the tension so skillfully that you end up feeling like you are on a roller coaster hurtling uncontrollably down an endless track. You don’t know whether you are in for Rear Window, Gaslight, or The Haunting. By the second half of the movie, the tension recedes as we discover we have been thrown bounteous red herrings; then we find out where the film is really headed. At this point, much of the breakneck momentum disappears. I started to feel like the scriptwriters just got lost in their own story. The last thirty minutes are improbable, even by the standards of the genre.

Michelle Pfeiffer does a terrific acting job as Claire, a good wife, slowly descending into insanity. Watch the changes in her facial expressions as the movie leaps from scene to scene. What starts as a nice, somewhat soft looking mom and wife transforms into a hardened, frightened woman struggling to maintain a just-by-the-nails grip on reality. Harrison Ford, as Norman, Claire’s husband, is efficient and believable. Diana Scarwid (Inside Moves, Silkwood) provides the comic relief, while Joe Morton (Astronaut’s Wife, Terminator 2) does his usual low key but excellent job as Pfeiffer’s psychiatrist. Alan Silvestri’s music is fittingly reminiscent of Bernard Hermann’s music for Hitchcock films.

Which leaves us with the director. In the HBO "making of" piece, Robert Zemeckis stated, "I wanted to try my hand at doing something really terrifying and suspenseful . . . I kept thinking, what would Hitchcock do if he had computer graphics?" Hitchcock probably wouldn’t have used them -- other than maybe a blue-screen setup to make sure his beautiful star’s hair didn’t get too messed up. Hitchcock always understood that the scariest motivations came from humans, not from special effects. Zemeckis learned all of Hitchcock’s technical tricks to perfection. There is even one scene lifted directly from Rear Window. He parades almost every conceivable formula in front of you with masterful ease. For the first hour, it works. But he loses the true human impulses. The second hour reminds you of the work he did on Tales from the Crypt, sometimes scary and occasionally silly. Even supernatural films require realistic motivations. The last ten minutes are just hokum, like a horror film where the scary monster is left out of sight until the climax, and then you laugh at the way it looks (Forbidden Planet, for instance). The movie starts brilliantly with enough white-knuckle tension to make your hands ache, but the payoff is not there . . . like foreplay without coitus. With all the Hitchcock allusions, I expected more.

The DreamWorks DVD transfer is superb. It has a beautiful and clear picture. Even on very dark scenes, there is excellent shadow detail. In fact, I think it would probably make a good test disc for checking LCD and DLP projectors for near-black resolution. A testament to the mastering folks -- there are scenes where the camera scans across the stiles of a staircase with no "jaggies." The sound is effortless and appropriate, from pianissimo to fortissimo. Car crashes sound like car crashes and gentle breezes sound like gentle breezes. A director’s audio commentary and an HBO First Look are the only added extras.

Zemeckis crammed this movie in during a break on the filming of Cast Away. Maybe he just didn’t have the time to whip the script into shape. If the whole film was like the second half, we might have considered What Lies Beneath to be a simple, pleasant wood-shedding experiment by Zemeckis while he had a little time off -- a nice summer popcorn movie. Instead, we have one-half of a classic movie. Pfeiffer’s acting, the forceful camera work, the perfect accompanying music, the multiple story lines, and the directing were in place. Our expectations were high. Then the film disintegrated in front of him and us. As it is, I wish he had discarded the second half of the script and made a story out of one of those red herrings. What a lost opportunity.

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