DOWSE guide to the movies                                                                                         

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  New Century of Cinema


DOWSE Guide to the Movies
by Tony Lee editor of Pigasus Press

What Lies Beneath

Director: Robert Zemeckis
130 minutes (15) aspect ratio 2.35:1
review by Gary Couzens

Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) is left alone during the day when her daughter goes to college and husband Norman (Harrison Ford) is away at work. Her nerves already frayed by a car crash, Claire begins to suspect that her neighbour has murdered his wife and soon sees glimpses of a woman who appears to be a ghost.
  What Lies Beneath begins as a horror film and turns into a suspense thriller, but it's the kind of genre-blend that doesn't work. The two elements finally work against each other, and an effective build-up is thrown away by every cliché in the thriller book. The film could also happily lose about twenty minutes. Despite Ford's top billing, the main character and the one through whose eyes we see everything, is Claire. Pfeiffer does a good job in charting Claire's journey from anxiety to terror to final fighting back. Ford has less to do but act as the instrument of Claire's self-doubt.
  But despite its flaws, What Lies Beneath is worth seeing. Zemeckis is a very competent craftsman. (He's also prolific: this film was made in the middle of the shooting schedule of the forthcoming Tom Hanks vehicle Cast Away, made for the same production companies and with much of the same crew.) Note the way he keeps the audience on edge from the start by withholding basic expository information - who are these characters and what is their relation to each other? - for longer than many directors would. Zemeckis's use of 'scope adds to the effect of some scenes: although he protects TV audiences by keeping his actors within a space that can fit a 4:3 TV set (or has them on opposite sides of the screen so that a TV version can cut from one to the other), but in other scenes he uses the edge of the frame to good effect: such as the scene where Claire goes upstairs, on the far left a computer switches itself on.
  Not a total success then, but one of the better of the major summer and autumn releases.

Gary Couzens

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