Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.
I’m a sucker for people playing against type. Give me Dennis Hopper playing a good guy, or Henry Fonda playing a complete bastard, and I’m in. It’s catnip for me, as is watching someone known for doing comedy excelling at a serious role. So, give me a movie where Harrison Ford is playing a professor who has had an affair with a student who has since gone missing and you have my attention. That movie is What Lies Beneath, which was somehow co-written by Clark Gregg, best-known as Agent Coulson from the Marvel Universe. It’s a big old world, but it’s folded over a lot. Norman Spencer (Ford) is an accomplished scientist living in the shadow of his mathematician father. He and his wife Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) live in Vermont in a large and fairly idyllic house, but the relationship is strained. A large part of this strain comes from Claire’s daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne) going off to college, leaving Claire and Norman as empty nesters.
The Spencers also have new neighbors, Warren (James Remar) and Mary Feur (Miranda Otto), who have a very volatile relationship—screaming arguments one day, passionate and wild sex the next. When Claire tries to speak with Mary and discovers her in a panic, and then Mary disappears for a few days, Clarie becomes convinced that she is dead at the hands of her husband. This coincides with a number of unexplained events at the house. The front door seems to open and close on its own, and Claire finds the bathtub filled, but did not fill it herself, and when she drains the water, she sees another woman’s reflection.
Eventually, Claire finds a number of clues that lead her to a missing woman named Madison Elizabeth Frank (Amber Valletta), who may have been one of Norman’s students. Did Norman have an affair with Madison? Did he have something to do with her disappearance? When Claire finds him unconscious in the bathtub, was this the accident he claims it was or was it a botched suicide? And with Claire seemingly slipping into a world where she genuinely believes that her house is haunted, how reliable can she be?
There’s a lot going on here that What Lies Beneath does really well. The word is that Robert Zemeckis really wanted to do something along the lines of Hitchcock, although Hitchcock never dove as head-first into the supernatural and paranormal as this film does. Zemeckis is a lot more at home with comedy (Back to the Future) and straight dramas (Forrest Gump), so this is a real departure for him, and for the most part, he handles it admirably.
There are some genuinely good creep moments here. This is especially true in the first half of the film. By the end, we’re going to have overt scares with Madison Frank being a much more prominent character rather than a reflection in the water. These are decent scares, but they’re more or less expected in a film that you know going into it (if you see the trailer, or even just the cover art on the DVD) is going to have a lot of supernatural elements. It’s the small stuff that works really well—the front door opening just before Claire puts her hand on the knob, for instance. It’s reminiscent of those early scenes in Poltergeist when the kitchen chairs rearrange themselves in a couple of seconds. It’s just a shade off normal, and because of it, it’s much more disturbing—it’s uncanny valley reality.
The film, for as long as it is (it runs about 130 minutes including the credits), doesn’t go in a lot of directions it could. We spend a little time with Claire’s friend Jody (Diana Scarwid), who seems to have some sense of the paranormal, but also seems to have a sense of humor about it. She and Claire perform a sort of séance, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. Later, Claire gets a book on witchcraft from Jody. None of these aspects are really played out, and it feels like a huge miss. Jody, with a little more background, could be a much bigger player and a lot more informative. The book that shows up is looked at a couple of times, but never figures into much of anything.
Even Claire’s visit to Madison’s mother (Micole Mercurio) only gets us to Claire discovering that Madison wore an unusual necklace, and allows her to steal a lock of Madison’s hair, which is then seen as the reason for some of the otherwise inexplicable events in the house. There’s a lot more than could be done here, and stealing a keepsake from the grieving mother of a missing girl seems really out of character for Claire.
So, ultimately, What Lies Beneath has some really good points and moments as well as a lot of red herrings and things that don’t really go anywhere. It could stand some refocusing, and probably a trim of about 20 minutes.
Why to watch What Lies Beneath: It starts out great.
Why not to watch: It goes in a lot of unnecessary directions.
