What Lies Beneath (2000, Michelle Pfeiffer, Harrison Ford) – Classic Film Review 1109

Director Robert Zemeckis’s 2000 thriller stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a New England middle-aged housewife who is happily married to well-to-do genetics professor Harrison Ford. And they really seem to have an idyllic life in their lovely new home in Vermont.

But then she is troubled by strange visions, finds there’s a ghost in her house and it looks like her. The ghost seems to seek a resolution of the crime that resulted in her death. But what’s it really telling her? Or is it threatening her life?

At first she suspects the neighbours are up to something but then it’s something much nearer to home. Zemeckis ensures that this is a sleek, satisfying, smoothly done, pacey, diabolical thriller.

Ford is top-billed but it’s Pfeiffer’s film all the way – and she makes a first-rate heroine in distress, both convincing and appealing, in her first hit for some time.

Clark Gregg turns in a polished, first-class screenplay from a story by Sarah Kernochan that tantalisingly deals with uncovering secrets about the past. It’s pleasing that it’s a Hitchcock-style film with musical (score by Alan Silvestri), visual (cinematography by Don Burgess) and plot references to Psycho and Vertigo – and Zemeckis pulls this off gracefully.

All in all, it’s a class act.

For such an intimate film, it was costly at $50million. But it took over $155million in the United States and nearly $300million worldwide.

Zemeckis filmed it while production on his other film Cast Away was shut down to allow Tom Hanks to lose weight and grow a beard.

http://derekwinnert.com/cast-away-classic-film-review-282/

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1109 derekwinnert.com