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What Lies Beneath
Hollywood heavyweights Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer join the director of Forrest Gump to take on an old fashioned ghost story
The 'things going bump in the middle of the night' film has never been more respectable than it does today, post-The Sixth Sense. Just look at that star pairing, not to mention box office champion director Zemeckis coming off the back of hits like Contact and Forrest Gump. Pfeiffer plays Claire, the anxious wife of ambitious professor Norman Spencer (Ford). When their only daughter leaves for college, Claire starts wandering moodily around their big, enviable lakeside house, spying on the neighbours and noticing strange things happening around the sitting room. Her husband dispatches her to a shrink, but it soon becomes clear that there is a real basis to her fear. Zemeckis makes things hard for himself from the start by making big nods to - or nicking from, depending on how you see it - great films such as Psycho and Les Diaboliques. This means the film has a lot to live up to. But it can't - what happens after the initial big red herring is all strictly predictable. This is the kind of film where you can spot the scary bits 20 seconds before they arrive. What Lies Beneath isn't a bad movie, or one that is painful to watch, but it is hard to take seriously on its own terms. It just goes 'boo!' once too often. Zemeckis may be a very rich man, but he isn't Hitchcock. |
