Movie Reviews

What Lies Beneath

2 Nov 2000

Like Arnie, Mel and all the other megastars, Harrison Ford plays the same character in every film: basically, an older version of every character he was playing about 15 years ago. Watching "What Lies Beneath", however, one realises (more than any film since "Witness") why his acting is still so highly regarded. This character is capable of more surprise and emotional depth than most of the others.

Not that he is the lead actor in this film. Though he gets top billing (which comes with being Harrison Ford), this film is based around the torments of his wife, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. These two seem like an ideal, middle-aged couple. Fortunately for the audience, eerie things start to happen around them, as aspects of their troubled past are revealed. It would be unfair to say much else, because the less you know, the more effectively creepy it is. Even the trailer discloses too much. In fact, I won't even mention that Miranda Otto plays a truly loopy character (American, of course), and I certainly won't tell you that it's a ghost story. That would spoil everything.

Director Robert Zemeckis, who has proven himself over the years with lighter (and highly popular) fare, has learned well from the masters of thrills and suspense. (He no doubt topped the class in "Bombastic Use of Eerie Music".) The story, by Sarah Kernochan and Clark Gregg, is consistently inventive. Pfeiffer, as always, gives a strong performance as the frenetic hero.

In fact, this has many of the elements of a great thriller, without actually being one. A major red herring, established early in the film, is never fully explained, presumably in the hope that we will be in too much suspense to notice. The climactic moment - full of extra twists and turns, showing off Zemeckis' cleverness - is so unnecessarily long that it becomes more like a climactic decade. After the promising beginning, it finishes as a truly ludicrous action-fest.

Enough said. Indeed, it's a frustrating film to review, because its most intriguing aspect, the one that warrants hours of post-film discussion, is one of the main surprises, something I wouldn't dare mention. That's the main attraction: no masterpiece, but a good film to talk about.