If you want to know what “blank check” filmmaking is like, look no further than Robert Zemeckis in 1999. In the middle of shooting the cursed Cast Away, they decided to take a long hiatus so that Tom Hanks could lose a bunch of weight and grow his hair and beard all crazy. I don’t know how you’re supposed to spend your break away from a technically-innovative, $90 million-dollar A-list project shot on location on an island in Fiji, but Zemeckis decided to take his crew and shoot another $100 million-dollar movie with even more A-listers. What Lies Beneath is a profoundly Hitchcock-influenced thriller starring Michelle Pfeiffer, that white gold, and Harrison Ford, that grumpy old. Was Zemeckis biting off more than he could chew? You know, I’m not sure.
Married couple Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) drop Claire’s daughter off at college and return to their lakeside home in Vermont. Their relationship is strained because Claire is in a bit of a crisis – she already gave up her career as a cellist, now she’s separated from her daughter for the first time, and, of course, a year ago she had a terrible car accident. Norman doesn’t really care, he’s got science work to do down at the lab. So Claire turns her attention to the new neighbors, Mary and Warren Feur (Miranda Otto and James Remar), who have a volatile relationship. When she decides to try to meet them and learn more about what’s going on, Mary mysteriously disappears and Warren is dismissive of Claire’s plucky curiosity.
Then the weird shit starts happening to the house. The front door starts opening on its own. The bath tub starts filling itself up. A framed newspaper article flies off Norman’s desk. Most alarmingly, Claire begins sees the shape of a mysterious woman. She becomes convinced Warren has done something to Mary and her spirit is trying to reach out to Claire for help. So Claire goes to Norman, since Warren works at the same university, but he’s not buying any of this, which, to his credit, is the correct response when someone tells you a ghost needs their help. So then things go back to normal and that’s it, that’s the whole story. Just kidding, things go even further off the rails, but maybe not in the way you’d expect?
What Lies Beneath is based on a real supernatural experience filmmaker Sarah Kernochan claims she had with compassionate spirits. Kernochan turned that into an intimate domestic drama for Steven Spielberg about an empty nester who befriends a ghost. Spielberg didn’t think he could make it, so he turned the script over to Zemeckis who brought in Clark Gregg, Marvel’s Agent Coulson, to transform it into a thriller. Kernochan estimated that only about 25% of her original story remained in the final film, and I think that’s the problem for me… that’s still too much. Zemeckis did not want to make Kernochan’s story but some vestiges of it remain just to bloat the movie to over two hours. What Lies Beneath needed a few more revisions because it wants to be a few different movies: is it about a lonely woman who is separated from her daughter and ignored by her husband? A benevolent paranormal entity who needs help? A vengeful spirit who needs revenge? For a while it’s basically Rear Window with ghosts. The movie doesn’t really get going until the second half, at which point there are a few plot lines that are just dropped completely. I still don’t get why the ghost spent so much time trying to terrify Claire when really she just wanted her help.
But, I gotta say, when it works it works. What Lies Beneath‘s poster has a bathtub on it and I’m happy to report that it does not disappoint on that front. Several of the spookiest scenes take place in the bathroom and the very best part of the movie involves Michelle Pfeiffer being stuck in the tub, which sounds ridiculous but it works. A great, unique, tense situation. Also it’s just kinda funny to have Harrison Ford in this role. Like I get that all the Indiana Jones movies have supernatural elements but he still seems like the last person you’d cast here. And yet he was Zemeckis’ first and only choice. Ford is such a grump that even when ghostly things happen to Norman, he refuses to believe they’re happening. It’s a bit infuriating but mostly I found him amusing.
So yeah, well-made, good cast, but it needed to be edited down more. Oh and it made $291.4 million at the box office, becoming the 10th highest grossing movie of 2000, behind Cast Away, which came in third.