What Lies Beneath (2000)

WHAT LIES BENEATH (DreamWorks) Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford, Diana Scarwid, James Remar, Joe Morton, Amber Valletta. Screenplay: Clark Gregg. Producers: Robert Zemeckis, Jack Rapke and Steve Starkey. Director: Robert Zemeckis. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (violence, profanity, adult themes) Running Time: 130 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

A word of sympathy, first, for WHAT LIES BENEATH's director Robert Zemeckis: It's probably not his fault that DreamWorks has been marketing the film with one of the most appallingly wrong-headed trailer and advertising campaigns I've ever seen. My critic colleagues and I often respond to certain overly-expository trailers with the comment, "Well, I don't have to see the movie now." Never has that been more true than in the case of WHAT LIES BENEATH. If you've seen the theatrical trailer for the film -- or virtually any of the commercials or plot summary blurbs, for that matter -- you've been cheated. WHAT LIES BENEATH is one half creepy, effective suspense thriller and one half predictable, over-wrought suspense thriller ... and the creepy, effective half is utterly destroyed by too much foreknowledge.

If you have the good fortune to enter WHAT LIES BENEATH without that foreknowledge, you'll be introduced to Norman (Harrison Ford) and Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer), a married couple in a newly empty nest after sending their only child off to college. Norman, a noted genetic researcher, at least has is work to keep him busy; Claire was once a gifted cellist, but gave up her career for family and is now left to putter about their over-sized Vermont home. And with all that time on her hands, she starts to notice things. Their next-door neighbors seem prone to violent arguments, and she sees strange comings and goings in the night. Soon, there are also some alarming events in the house itself. Doors open by themselves, pictures fall from the shelves ... and Claire becomes convinced that a dead woman is trying to contact her.

You will find no reference herein to a later turn of plot that dominates advertising for the film. There may be someone out there who could be thoroughly caught up in Zemeckis' knowing homage to Hitchcock (most specifically REAR WINDOW), with its instantly loaded atmosphere of menace and a notable absence of underscore that makes many scenes even more unsettling. Unlike that hypothetical someone, however, I knew what was coming. I knew the developments that would dominate the second half of the film, and their relationship to the events in the first half of the film. I realized that my time was being wasted on a set-up that had been blasted into irrelevance by some marketing wizard with an itchy trigger finger, the sort of cinematic thickhead who would have looked at PSYCHO in 1960 and said, "Hey, let's put that girl getting stabbed in the shower in the trailer -- that's good stuff." And I grew angrier, and angrier, and angrier.

I grew angrier still when I saw the frantic mess that DreamWorks had seen fit to promote so hard. It's bad enough that the potentially eerie ghost story of WHAT LIES BENEATH's first act turns into run-of-the-mill run-from-the-killer movie. Worse yet is the way the film's conclusion is drawn out to such an agonizing degree that the approximately 2,647 individual shock scenes -- each one accompanied by a burst of Alan Silvestri's strings, of course -- become numbing in their every-60-seconds predictability. The final 25 minutes of WHAT LIES BENEATH eventually degenerate into such an absurd parody of scary movie climaxes I kept waiting for a Wayans brother to appear and exclaim, "Whazzup?!?"

I won't deny that much of WHAT LIES BENEATH works on a purely visceral level -- I jumped a few times, I was tense a few more times, and so on. There's also one great sequence near the end involving a threat of slow drowning that works on almost every possible level. It's the kind of sequence that makes it hard to hate a film, even when the people selling the film show such open contempt for the audience. And really, there's no other way to describe what DreamWorks has done. Their marketing department has decided, "Our job is to get the people into the theater; we don't care if we've ruined the experience of actually watching the film in the process." I don't think WHAT LIES BENEATH would have been a particularly good film even without that disastrous decision -- there's far too much laughable dead weight down the stretch -- but it would have been a much more watchable one. Critics are often accused of being too hard on films because of expectations based on how much we know about them ahead of time. At least this time we're going to have plenty of company.

     On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 ass marketings:  4.

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