Which brings me to What Lies Beneath, a nifty nailbiter that doesn't offer one original addition to the existing catalog of scary movies but offers the familiar elements with such panache and pure artistry that it doesn't matter one bit that we've seen it all before.
Michelle Pfeiffer is Claire Spencer, a talented cellist who gave up her career to marry Harrison Ford. Ford’s Dr. Norman Spencer is a geneticist who resents always being identified with his brilliant mathemetician father. Claire, as the film opens, is adding empty-nest syndrome to the after-trauma of a car accident a year earlier, the details of which she can’t recall.
Given that, when she begins experiencing strange and curious happenings in her late father-in-law’s deluxe lakeside home it’s not surprising that everyone sort of winks and tells her she needs to relax. The trouble is, the happenings are, well, happening. There’s a ghost in the house with an urgent message, and Claire has to choose between finding out what that message is or never taking another bath as long as she lives.
This is all standard fare for supernatural thrillers. What makes it work and gives it an edge are the skilled performances by Pfeiffer and Ford, who give their characters more depth than is usually found in the genre. They are then ably supported by the deft hand of director Robert Zemekis, who avoids gore in preference to suspense.
Unlike the heroines of most films like this, Claire Spencer actually has not only half a brain in her head but a decent amount of common sense. Her first impulse is to find a logical explanation for all the odd things going on around her. Unfortunately, when she misinterprets a clue and accuses her next-door neighbor of murdering his wife, it doesn’t help her credibility. Yet not even her growing realization that the path she’s following may lead to destruction isn’t enough to stop her from going after the truth.
The real tour-de-force acting job, though, comes from Harrison Ford, whose more recent projects have started to look an awfully lot alike. His subtle disintegration as his wife uncovers more and more threads in the mystery and his earnest justification for his actions are dead-on, and it’s guaranteed that once you’ve seen this movie you’ll never look at Indiana Jones in the same way again.
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