As What Lies Beneath opens, Michelle Pfeiffer is naked in a bathtub. This rivals the underbelly shot of the Imperial Star Destroyer chasing the frigate in the first moments of Star Wars as the best way to begin a movie.
Claire Spencer is a woman suffering empty nest syndrome. Many years earlier, she had married Norman Spencer and given up her musical career to live with him and give her daughter a family and a home. He is a professor and a research scientist struggling to get out of his famous scientist father’s shadow; many people mistake him for his dad, who passed on and left them a huge house that they have remodeled. Claire is also recovering from a car accident that she had a year earlier.
Now her daughter is off to college and she is alone in this house. After a disturbing encounter with their new neighbors, she notices that the wife has disappeared…and a ghost seems to be haunting their house.
Direct Robert Zemeckis made this movie not before CastAway, not after CastAway…but during Castaway. While Tom Hanks was working hard to lose the pudge he had gained for the first part of the movie, so that he could appear gaunt and muscular in the second half of the movie, Zemeckis kept himself busy by filming What Lies Beneath.
Around 2000, trailers for both movies ran and both frustrated viewers by giving away the entire plot. Zemeckis believes that viewers want to know everything that happens in a movie before they go, and thus CastAway trailers featured scenes of Tom Hanks returned to civilization while What Lies Beneath gives away the who for the whodunnit! So I guess what I’m saying is, don’t ever watch the trailer for this one. It’s particularly frustrating given that the movie goes to extraordinary lengths to obfuscate with red herring and misdirection what it gives away in the trailer.
The movie is written by Clark Gregg. Yes, the guy from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., though back then he wasn’t even the guy from “New Adventures of Old Christine” yet.
The music is intense, reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie, inasmuch as Alan Silvestri is Bernard Herrmann-ing so hard that he’s in danger of having the soundtrack ripped off by Danny Elfman.
The movie has a lot of Hitchcock influences, although the film has a strong dose of the supernatural and Hitch stuck to the real world.
This is Michelle Pfeiffer’s movie and she has fun with it, especially since Harrison Ford does his best to wrestle the Mister Wooden Acting trophy back from Keanu Reeves. Pfeiffer and her best friend, played by Diana Scarwid, get some wine and attempt to contact the spirit inhabiting the house using a Ouija board. I love this scene because Scarwid takes the cliched “wine-loving divorcee best friend” role and uses it to great effect to inject enough humor to offset the creeps, causing Pfeiffer to have to wrestle the seance back from slumber party silliness.
Harrison Ford may not do a lot with this role, but this does seem like the last time you really see “Harrison Ford” as we knew him in a movie. And not just because he has his shirt off. After this film, Ford mainly seems to be in movies where they offered him enough money to do stuff he hated.
I’ve done my best to keep this spoiler-free, but I will say: be sure to watch the last few frames of the movie before the credits.
