***/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer, Diana Scarwid, Miranda Otto
screenplay by Clark Gregg
directed by Robert Zemeckis
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover What Lies Beneath isn't very nasty, but it's nice. The film takes Polanski-style horror, the kind where the environment itself seems to be falling apart and the individual has to navigate through miles of decay, and gives it a white-enamel Hollywood gloss that makes it fearfully cold and sinisterly antiseptic. It's a given from the get-go that this pure whiteness will, by film's end, be defiled by the blood of the innocent and the violence of the guilty. It's only a matter of time before it gets there, but the travel involved is bracing and loaded with suspense. While the end of What Lies Beneath wallows in some rather familiar horror-movie scare tactics, the rest of it is a nicely understated affair that cleverly plays on your nerves without relying too much on brutality or not enough on jolt.
Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the wife of biologist Norman (Harrison Ford) and the proud owner of a big, newly-renovated house near a lake. Her daughter (Katherine Towne), with whom she is intensely close, has gone off to college, leaving her mother more time on her hands than she's used to; empty nest syndrome has set in, and she doesn't even have her old career as a cellist to fall back on. It is within such a backdrop that strange things will happen, which will cast her out of the net of security into which she has fallen.
It begins, innocently enough, with an unlocked front door, which, despite constant attention, opens with alarming regularity. Little things like this keep happening; a broken picture frame here, a drawing of bath water there, and Claire begins to wonder if she's losing her sanity. Furthermore, she has a strange encounter with a panicked new neighbour and begins to suspect that, one rainy night, her husband has killed her and hoisted her off for burial in their sports utility vehicle. This, however, turns out to be a red herring; the neighbours have nothing to do with the supernatural goings-on in her house–events that are adding up to something close to her. As Claire follows the clues she is given she begins to suspect the things that give her life coherence.
If that sounds a little vague, that's because the film has a few surprises I'd rather not reveal. It does, of course, bear a family resemblance to Rosemary's Baby, that other film about a woman under the influence of the supernatural. What Lies Beneath's form is actually quite similar to Polanski's in that it traps you in its female lead's point of view and then gets you to question its limits. Both films feature a heroine who has to put the pieces together as to what is happening to her and her life; and both films come up with a solution that knocks them out of the placid existence which defines their lives. But where the Polanski film ultimately had her capitulate to the Satanic uses to which she has been put, What Lies Beneath takes its heroine out of her complacent sleep and into an active role with which she defeats the forces that threaten to get away with murder.
The aesthetic of this guessing game gives us excellent support by way of Robert Zemeckis. Normally, I would give Robert Zemeckis very little credit, for he is the perpetrator of Forrest Gump. While he's no Polanski in terms of style, he still knows how to evoke the fringes of Claire's perceptions, giving feelings where there should be information and leaving unnoticed spaces open for questioning. The look of the film is always one step ahead of the heroine, suggesting that there is more to a scene than the action it depicts; the camera will pan slowly across a room, suggesting a point of view that excludes the oblivious Claire, or show more space than is necessary for the information to register, alluding to the forces around her that may erupt at any time. We are always given slightly more information than Claire has, but never too much–just enough to know that something is wrong, and to build the tension until an unsuspecting Claire blunders into the threat.
The picture also scores major points for not turning into a sexist free-for-all. It's unusual for a Hollywood production to be this concerned with the psychological well-being of a woman who has given up her career for her family, or to show that she has been cheated all along by the arrangement. I can't tell you how the film arrives at this conclusion, because that would mean major spoilers and I want to keep the discoveries fresh. But the fact remains that What Lies Beneath asks major questions about the discarding of mothers after they have fulfilled their domestic duties and the price to be paid for giving up a career for the sake of the family. By the conclusion, she finds her assumptions about her role trashed, a modest but definite improvement over the female monsters of the likes of Fatal Attraction: here we have the male monster that we suspected all along was behind the legion of women who were shot down in the name of domination.
It would be nice to say that the film works on all of these levels, but there are flaws that bear the fingerprints of Hollywood squares. The world in which the Spencers live is painted with the same bland upper-middle-class gloss that plagues so many American movies. The home aesthetic is all wood floors and enamel white, blank and unappealing, and no matter how expensive it looks it makes the characters seem like idiots just for living there. These "average" people often have no personality of their own, and it kills the suspense when you just can't penetrate who these people are, what they like, and what makes them different. And the ending is a compendium of clichés involving blood-covered villains who seem to be dead, but aren't, accompanied by shrieking Bernard Hermann-esque violins that tell you it's okay to be scared now. It's shorthand like this that kills the suspense by lowering the stakes at risk, and one wishes the script and the art direction had a little more personality to make things seem scarier.
These flaws keep What Lies Beneath from achieving at a high level, but even the low-grade movie we wind up with is fairly enjoyable and even a little scary. It also breaks the mold of countless other male-centred horror films, opting instead for a personal journey along with an adding up of clues. All said, this is a pretty serviceable little scare movie–no masterpiece, but fairly lively, engrossing, and satisfying. Originally published: July 24, 2000.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Constant Readers of this site know that I dig What Lies Beneath, so much so that it earned a spot on my Top 10 of 2000 list (albeit at number ten). The film arrives on DVD in a 2.35:1, anamorphic video transfer that's on par with the included DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, which is to say just short of stunning. Shadow detail and contrast wane during night shots and scenes that take place in dark exteriors, but this is not a drastic problem, and most of the set-pieces, such as the major bathtub sequence (cinematic genius, by the way–Zemeckis credits editor Arthur Schmidt with its impact above all others) are brightly lit, anyhow. Colours burst yet remain in check, saturation-wise.
DTS has a slight upper hand in the audio department (the DD 5.1 recording sounds a bit damp in comparison), though I'm surprised either isn't more active in the split surrounds, given Zemeckis's attention to aural detail in past efforts like Contact (still a demo of choice at home theatres everywhere). The LFE channel flexes its might, but an overall lack of rear effects probably explains why DreamWorks didn't bother to ES- and EX-enhance, respectively, the duelling mixes, a practice the studio has stuck to since The Haunting.
Zemeckis and producers Steve Starkey and Jack Rapke offer a rich commentary track, even if Zemeckis leaves too much information to be distributed by his co-hosts. I enjoyed their uncritical analysis of What Lies Beneath, right down to the speculation that the picture won't be as unpredictable to those viewers years down the road who aren't aware of the actors' mythos, as many of the story's twists rely on the rapport that Ford and Pfeiffer have established with modern audiences. The team's refusal to go into detail on a particular illusion (wherein the camera lowers to the point where it's under the floorboards staring upwards; as an aspiring filmmaker, I want movie magic ruined for me, damnit) is a rare smudge on a solid track.
Next, we have the HBO First Look special "Constructing the Perfect Thriller", a retrospective on Zemeckis's career more than anything else, one that omits mention of Back to the Futures II and III at that. (No, he didn't jump straight from Who Framed Roger Rabbit into Death Becomes Her, although I'm sure he'd prefer to remember it that way.) There are fleeting glimpses of the elaborate effects pre-CGI in the latter half of the "doc," but hardly enough context is provided for them to sate the appetite of curious buffs. In addition to cast and crew bios and production notes, a widescreen trailer in DD 5.1 rounds out the package.
130 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English DTS 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; DreamWorks
