Review of What Lies Beneath (2000) by Timothy S — 13 Jun 2014

"What Lies Beneath" is a big budget, big name version of a Hallmark movie; beautiful people, beautiful scenery, cheap and easy scares and a completely convoluted plot. The problem is that the whole thing is full of so many red herrings that you're left feeling very unsatisfied, and there isn't nearly enough story here to sustain its bloated running time.

It starts out as a ghost story but turns much more conventional than that at the half, and then you realize that none of the ghost story elements (such as the computer typing the initials of the dead girl by itself) make any sense within the new "killer in the house" context. By the times it veers back into the supernatural in the end, I had given up on the mess.

Robert Zemeckis is a skilled filmmaker, but his first thriller closely emulates Hitchcock and that makes it seem like an even bigger failure. The ending is especially Hitch-like in its use of similar music, but it's hard to feel involved because these characters are so uninteresting. Harrison Ford isn't convincing in the least in the psycho role, and Michelle Pfieffer is too weak and neurotic to muster much empathy for her character.

A lot of plot devices are thrown in but they never lead anywhere, such as the bickering neighbors or Pfieffer's near-fatal car accident. Just more confusion to throw the viewer off that are never resolved.

"What Lies Beneath" is a beautifully and skillfully constructed thriller that is nevertheless empty, bloated and somewhat dumb. The basic story could have easily been pared down to about an hour if all the unnecessary distractions had been eliminated.