What Lies Beneath
USA 2000
Reviewed by Philip Strick
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Her nerves on edge after a car crash a year ago, Claire Spencer finds herself idle when her daughter, Caitlin, goes off to college. Claire's husband, Dr Norman Spencer, a geneticist, is loving but overworked, determined to better the achievements of his late father. Alone in their lakeside house in Vermont, Claire becomes certain that their neighbour, Warren Feur, has murdered his wife, Mary. She is also uneasy about strange happenings in the house and imagines glimpses of a phantom woman.
At the suggestion of her psychiatrist and with the help of her friend Jody, Claire attempts a seance. Shaken by its apparent result, she rushes to Norman's campus laboratory where Warren, one of the faculty tutors, is accompanied by Mary, alive and well. At home, a press cutting hidden behind a picture frame refers to a missing girl, Madison Elizabeth Frank. Tracing Madison's mother, Claire visits the girl's room and removes a memento, a braid of Madison's hair. With this and a book on witchcraft for guidance she tries to contact the dead, a process which 'transforms' her into Madison for long enough to realise that Norman had an affair with her.
Norman admits his lapse and begs forgiveness. Claire later finds a jewel-box in the lake containing Madison's pendant, and under questioning Norman admits to hiding the girl's body after her suicide. Claire insists he calls the police but he drugs her into immobility and confesses he killed Madison to prevent her ruining his life's work, as he must now kill Claire. Avoiding being drowned in the bath, Claire crashes their car into the lake, where Madison's enfolding corpse prevents Norman resurfacing.
Review
Given that the making of What Lies Beneath was reportedly sandwiched between production schedules of another new Robert Zemeckis project (Cast Away), the extent to which the two completed films will be seen to complement each other must await future measurement. In its own right, however, there is no denying that What Lies Beneath is something of a disappointment after the grander designs of Contact. Despite the high-gloss players and lavishly tailored settings, the film contrives to be both overdressed and undernourished, a twilight-zone anecdote attenuated beyond its reasonable span. Intended as a Hitchcockian suspense thriller (one of the few genres not previously tackled by Zemeckis), it has blatant and joltingly effective allegiances but remains ultimately unconvincing.
Hitchcock's plots, while not averse to some divine intervention, scorned the supernatural as a driving force. Zemeckis, director of Death Becomes Her and episodes of the television series Tales from the Crypt, has no such qualms. His audience - primed, in fact, as much by Henri-Georges Clouzot as by Hitchcock, thanks to the copious bathroom scenes - may insist on working out a rational explanation for the film's spectral assaults, but Zemeckis gleefully complies with the current craze for being spooked by disguising his heroine's intuitive imaginings (Claire is haunted by visions of her husband Norman's dead mistress) as a story of revenge from beyond the grave. Depending on our preference, the film just about holds together as a case history of shared delusion, the ghosts only in the minds of the neurotic wife and fickle husband. And our scepticism is usefully prompted by the reminders of Rear Window (1954) and Psycho (1960), although the tearing of the shower curtain and Alan Silvestri's Herrmannesque soundtrack are a bit much. It will not escape notice that the duplicitous spouse is called Norman.
Written by Clark Gregg, better known for his acting (The Usual Suspects), What Lies Beneath craftily employs two habitual Hitchcockian devices, the plot detour and the peculiar bystander. Much of the film's first half is time-wasted by the mystery of the neighbours whose violent dispute leads to the removal of a corpse-sized parcel. This lively melodrama has no bearing on the 'real' story except that, like the several predicaments unfolding in the apartments of Rear Window, it provides an uncanny parallel to the central relationship. Up to the point at which the villain turns indestructible and we are stuck with a gory collection of horror-film clichés, What Lies Beneath is a gallery of eccentrics echoing the innumerable rehearsals for marriage in Hitchcock's work. Oddly adrift, like Claire's best friend Jody or Mrs Frank and her cat, these troubled souls seem even to extend to Claire's enigmatic psychiatrist and to her daughter's withdrawn room-mate. Inadvertent spirits, there but not there, they embody the sorry relics of countless lost partnerships.
Such losses are a constant in Zemeckis' films: what really lies beneath his flashy and ingenious surfaces has been a tide of dysfunctional families, missing parents and deprived offspring. Norman's problem, as it was for the hero of Back to the Future and the heroine of Contact, is his departed father whose house he now occupies and whose achievements he struggles to transcend. The theme of mislaid and displaced children, central to Forrest Gump and Back to the Future II, continues here in the form of the wraith herself, an unnerving substitute for the daughter who has assumed the independence of college life. At the same time, the ghostly obsessive and her anguished observer are the latest recruits to the Zemeckis army of 'driven' women, pathetic in Forrest Gump, comical in Death Becomes Her, deadly serious in Contact. Frequently linking his characters' awakenings with a magical casket (the 'Flux Capacitor' of Back to the Future now becomes a revelatory jewel-box), much given to rolling his cast down flights of stairs, and showing a Tarkovskian relish for soaking them amid bursts of lightning, Zemeckis is having a grand time making his audiences jump but seems intriguingly hell-bent for matters of deeper concern.
Credits
- Director
- Robert Zemeckis
- Producers
- Steve Starkey
- Robert Zemeckis
- Jack Rapke
- Screenplay
- Clark Gregg
- Based on a story by
- Sarah Kernochan
- Clark Gregg
- Director of Photography
- Don Burgess
- Editor
- Arthur Schmidt
- Production Designers
- Rick Carter
- Jim Teegarden
- Music/Music Conductor
- Alan Silvestri
- ©Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation and DreamWorks LLC
- Production Companies
- Twentieth Century Fox and DreamWorks Pictures present an Imagemovers
- production
- Executive Producers
- Joan Bradshaw
- Mark Johnson
- Associate Producers
- Steven Boyd
- Cherylanne Martin
- Production Supervisor
- Peter Toby Tobyansen
- Production Controller
- Jim Turner
- Production Co-ordinators
- Christine Haas
- Vermont Crew:
- Matthew J. Birch
- Unit Production Manager
- Cherylanne Martin
- Location Managers
- Gregory H. Alpert
- Timothy Hillman
- Vermont Crew:
- Shawn Sweeney
- Post-production Executive
- Martin Cohen
- 2nd Unit Director
- Steve Starkey
- Underwater Unit Director
- Max Kleven
- Assistant Directors
- Josh McLaglen
- Rich T. Sickler
- Paula Harris
- 2nd Unit:
- Darin Rivetti
- Basil Bryant Grillo
- Underwater Unit:
- Carla Corwin
- Script Supervisors
- Luca Kouimelis
- 2nd Unit:
- Kerry Lyn McKissick
- Casting
- Ellen Lewis
- Marcia DeBonis
- Additional:
- Judith Bouley
- Associates:
- Amanda Koblin
- Wendy Washbrook
- Directors of Photography
- 2nd Unit:
- Robert Steadman
- Underwater Unit:
- Mike Thomas
- Camera/Steadicam Operator
- Robert Presley
- Visual Effects Supervisor
- Robert Legato
- Special Visual Effects
- Sony Pictures Imageworks Inc
- Additional Digital Effects
- The Computer Film Company, London
- Special Effects Supervisor
- T. Brooklyn Bellissimo
- Special Effects Co-ordinator
- Charles Belardinelli
- Special Effects
- Shannon J. Thompson
- Andy Miller
- Thomas Zell
- Christy Sumner
- Frank Iudica Jr
- Malia K. Thompson
- Jerry Donegan Jr
- Puppeteers
- James Hirahara
- Luke Khanlian
- Greg Nicotero
- Shane Mahan
- Richard Landon
- Tony McCray
- Jason Matthews
- Associate Editor
- R. Orlando Duenas
- Art Directors
- Tony Fanning
- Stefan Dechant
- Elizabeth Lapp
- Set Designers
- Patte Strong-Lord
- Pam Klamer
- Alicia MacCarone
- Beverli Eagan
- Masako Masuda
- Beck Taylor
- Set Decorator
- Karen O'Hara
- Storyboard Artist
- Kevin MacCarthy
- Costume Designer
- Susie DeSanto
- Costume Supervisor
- Elinor Bardach
- Key Make-up Artist
- Deborah La Mia Denaver
- Key Hairstylist
- Janice Alexander
- Madison Make-up Effects Design/Creation
- Stan Winston Studio
- Opticals
- Pacific Title
- Scoring Co-ordinator
- David Bifano
- Music Editor
- Ken Karman
- Music Recording Mixer
- Dennis Sands
- Music Consultant
- Joel Sill
- Soundtrack
- "Too Late" - Lo-Ball; "Domination" - Adam Hamilton; "Gymnopedie No. 1" - Rowena Hammill; "The Four Seasons: Autumn"
- Sound Design
- Randy Thom
- Production Sound Mixer
- William B. Kaplan
- Re-recording Mixers
- Randy Thom
- Tom Johnson
- Dennis Sands
- Supervising Sound Editor
- Dennis Leonard
- Dialogue Supervisor
- Marilyn McCoppen
- Dialogue Editor
- Ewa Sztompke-Oatfield
- Sound Effects Editors
- David Hughes
- Andrea Gard
- ADR
- Supervisor:
- Marilyn McCoppen
- Loop Group:
- Mitch Carter
- Alexander Newell
- Edie Mirman
- David Cowgill
- Philece Sampler
- Moosie Drier
- Iake Eissinmann
- Bridget Hoffman
- Donna Lynn Leavy
- Claudette Wells
- L.A. MadDogs
- Recordist:
- David Lucarelli
- Mixer:
- Charleen Richards
- Foley
- Artists:
- Dennie Thorpe
- Jana Vance
- Recordist:
- Frank Pepe Merel
- Mixer:
- Tony Eckert
- Editors:
- Mary Helen Leasman
- Jonathan Null
- Marine Co-ordinator
- Michael George
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Tim Davison
- Animal Trainers
- Cheryl Harris
- Julie Schultz
- Cast
- Harrison Ford
- Norman Spencer
- Michelle Pfeiffer
- Claire Spencer
- Diana Scarwid
- Jody
- Victoria Bidewell
- Beatrice
- Joe Morton
- Doctor Drayton
- James Remar
- Warren Feur
- Miranda Otto
- Mary Feur
- Madison Elizabeth Frank
- Katharine Towne
- Caitlin Spencer
- Dennison Samaroo
- Jennifer Tung
- PhD students
- Eliott Goretsky
- Teddy
- Rachel Singer
- Daniel Zelman
- PhD students
- Ray Baker
- Dr Stan Powell
- Wendy Crewson
- Elena
- Sloane Shelton
- Mrs Templeton
- Tom Dahlgren
- Dean Templeton
- Micole Mercurio
- Mrs Frank
- Donald Taylor
- male EMT worker
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- 20th Century Fox (UK)
- 11,687 feet
- 129 minutes 52 seconds
- Dolby Digital/DTS/SDDS
- Colour/Prints by Technicolor
- 2.35:1 [Panavision]