by Yazmin Ghonaim

WHAT LIES BENEATH Robert Zemeckis (2000) What Lies Beneath, directed by Robert Zemeckis (Contact, Forrest Gump), plays with the notion of the "unexpected". What Lies Beneath is a supernatural thriller that takes the viewer by his hesitant hand and leads him through a series of suspenseful occurrences which seem incoherent and which beg to be resolved. What Lies Beneath focuses on Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford), a scientist who is absorbed by his work and his success, and his wife Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), who traded her career as a cellist for her husband and daughter. After their daughter moves out of the home and into the new college dorm, Claire is suddenly left alone and with enough time on her hands to notice the increasingly perplexing activities next door. Suspecting her neighbor is a murderer, Claire's stability is shattered. Soon, however, her focus is violently shifted inward, as she begins experiencing the ghostly presence of another woman in her own home. Resisting Norman's natural tendency to dismiss her sightings as hallucinations, Claire unravels the identity of the troubled lady ghost, and through her learns of her husband's hidden secret. In order to create suspense, What Lies Beneath relies on an eerily slow camera that is too patient in revealing significant images, on the use of extended silences and sudden noises, and on typical thrill-seeking visual puns, such as the sudden double reflection in a mirror. What Lies Beneath clumsily reflects a fascination with Hitchcock's classic thrillers Rear Window and Psycho. This is seen where the characters' voyeuristic habits (and subjectively edited images) conclude that the neighbor killed his wife. Secondly, Dr. "Norman" Spencer's name recalls Norman Bates, and the use of the shower/bathtub as a place where the victim is shown in its most vulnerable state, both echo Hitchcock's most memorable murder scene. In spite of a few interesting camera angles, What Lies Beneath is suffocated by poor character definition (often relying on Norman's Harvard T-shirt to accentuate his sketchy qualities) and by a type of drama which stems from the suspended punch lines of familiar jokes. If stripped away of all its layers --which tease, trick and cheat the viewer-- then, what lies beneath is a weightless story about the buoyant quality of truth.		DVD Music Books Search by keywords:
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