WHAT LIES BENEATH (2000) **1/2 Robert Zemeckis does a great job of maintaining continuous suspense. The camera's always not showing what's behind someone, or lingering on a window or a door, the characters are clearly either anticipating something or not, which leads you do so to in either case. That these clues almost never lead to anything only makes the string more taut. Unfortunately the downside of this approach is that if the string is always taut, the audience is always ready. It's amazing how Michelle Pfeiffer can look so normal and so weird at the same time. We get much more of her than Harrison Ford, which works well as he isn't very good in these Rolling Stones t-shirt wearing, genius genetic research science scion husband roles. Diana Scarwid is irritating, which is to say convincing perhaps, as the ditsy friend who dabbles in various esoteric endeavors but is afraid of anything intangible and real. Without Zemeckis and Pfeiffer this wouldn't have been much, too many Hollywood plot angles, you can tell whodunnit way before you get a clue as to what was done, and what was done is hardly surprising and barely interesting, but the director and the lead keep things tense if not terrifying, and rolling along with a gritty grating feel. Not the easiest thing to do in a film shot in a nice lakeside home, burdened with an unimaginitive plot and a both inadequate and bland male lead, and subtexts relating to lab research.
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