What are the key elements of a classic Hitchcockian thriller? Voyeurism? The murder next door? A threatened blond? A psychopathic killer? Terror in everyday surroundings? Fear of falling? Or drowning? All of it whipped together in excruciating set pieces that tear you apart with suspense or laughter?
All those and more are part of the spooky mix in “What Lies Beneath,” Robert Zemeckis’ high-tech and obvious attempt to match the Master at his own game.
Hitchcock has been a lifelong favorite of mine, and I enjoy almost all his films. But I’m not usually fond of attempts to imitate him, even by Brian De Palma or Francois Truffaut. “What Lies Beneath” is an exception, a classy supernatural lady-in-distress thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer as middle-class Vermont couple Norman and Claire Spencer, menaced by the past, and possibly haunted and pursued by a ghostly presence: a young girl who was murdered nearby.
As its title suggests, the movie is about the awful things that may lie under our normal, sunny surface routines, about buried, dark secrets erupting into the light. Claire, the central character or “eye” of most of the movie, is a professor’s wife who believes that something mysterious and deadly has taken over her life. And though most of the action is confined to the Spencers’ two-story Vermont suburban home, and many of the situations in Clark Gregg’s script are quite familiar from dozens of other movie chillers, the movie works fairly well at shocking and shaking us up. Zemeckis has never made a pure thriller before, and his technique is often a joy to behold and shiver over, though the less said about “Beneath’s” plot the better.
It’s one of the more successful pieces of Hitch mimicry I’ve seen in recent years, right down to the spine-tingling slow pace, the signature stairway and bathroom scenes and an Alan Silvestri score that eerily echoes the moody, racy tension of Bernard Herrmann’s soundtracks for “Vertigo” and “Psycho.”
Here’s a sketchy synopsis. The movie is set in an old frame house near a lake, where we see Pfeiffer and Ford as the Spencers, housewife Claire and physicist-teacher Norman. We see them in homey surroundings, in a bed: a smart pair whose lusts have survived middle age. As with almost all thriller couples, we think we know ’em and like ’em — that we’re in familiar surroundings. We learn better.
Wandering in her yard one day, with lots of time on her hands after daughter Caitlin (Katharine Towne) leaves for college, Claire hears weeping from over the fence. She catches a glimpse of blond hair. Intrigued and unsettled, she begins to spy on the house next door, suspecting that the couple there have marital problems and that the husband (James Remar, a familiar movie psycho of the ’80s) may be planning murder. Shades of “Rear Window.”
That’s only the first of Zemeckis’ many bows to Hitchcock. Before the show has ended, we’ll see homages or allusions to “Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “Suspicion,” “Torn Curtain,” “Shadow of a Doubt,” “Frenzy” and even the ’50s Hitchcock TV show, “Breakdown,” all racing past us like shock-stops on the Hitchcockian subway. (Zemeckis even borrows from Henri-Georges Clouzot’s non-Hitch French suspense classic, “Diabolique” — a movie Hitchcock greatly admired.) The major departure of “Beneath” from its models lies in the supernatural element, a device usually foreign to Hitchcock, except as a red herring. Dominating much of the movie is Claire’s increasing belief that her house is haunted by the ghost of a murdered girl (Amber Valletta) — overriding the skepticism of hubby Norman, her best pal Jody (Diana Scarwid) or Drayton, her doctor (Joe Morton).
More than that, I’m not going to tell you. In fact, I think the trailer for “What Lies Beneath” gives away too much. This is one film that benefits from as much ignorance of the story as possible.
“Beneath” also benefits from Zemeckis’ high technical skills, his mastery of digital trickery and film point of view, the stunning clarity with which he lays out each scene and the sudden baroque flourishes that explode inside them. There are scenes here in which everything depends not on gore and fast pace but on long, slow, spine-tinglingly protracted anxiety: one nerve-racking sequence of Claire in a slowly filling bathtub, another of her quiet invasion of the house next door, with the wind ominously rustling, every footfall hitting your nerves. There is one device Zemeckis tends to overuse, the old “Great Expectations” device of a character appearing suddenly in the edge of the frame to startle the protagonist. But his visual setups are so immaculately clever he makes us jump almost every time.
As for Pfeiffer and Ford, they’re ideal actors for a high-style suspense piece like this — since we’ve seen them so many times, we’re convinced we know them. Ford is a perfect skeptical husband, gruff on top, anxious below, and he gives layers and depth to what initially seems a simple part. And Pfeiffer makes Claire a spot-on lady-in-distress. Not many actresses could compel belief in a story like this, in situations that are frankly sometimes hackneyed or obvious, with the right grace and ease.
But Pfeiffer can. Trapped recently in some schmaltzy turkeys — “The Deep End of the Ocean,” “The Story of Us” — she makes Claire and this movie glow. With her wide, wary eyes and heartbreakingly delicate features, she gives Claire the kind of intense, open, almost childlike demeanor that suggests any menace is real, any terror truly happening.
Hitchcock himself would have gone crazy for Pfeiffer, even if he’d had her hair combed and unfrizzed. But “What Lies Beneath” is not a foolproof script; in hands other than Zemeckis’, it might have seemed trite and obvious. For all its technical skill and icy control, it couldn’t really work without Pfeiffer, Ford and the good secondary characters. All of them, along with director Zemeckis, show something beyond the old movie cliche surfaces, something that really does lie beneath.
`WHAT LIES BENEATH’
(star)(star)(star)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis; written by Clark Gregg; photographed by Don Burgess; edited by Arthur Schmidt; production designed by Rick Carter, Jim Teegarden; music by Alan Silvestri; visual effects supervisor Robert Legato; produced by Zemeckis, Steve Starkey, Jack Rapke. A DreamWorks Pictures/Twentieth Century Fox release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:10. MPAA rating: PG-13 (terror/violence, sensuality and brief language.
THE CAST
Norman Spencer …………. Harrison Ford
Claire Spencer …………. Michelle Pfeiffer
Madison Elizabeth Frank …. Amber Valletta
Jody ………………….. Diana Scarwid
Dr. Drayton ……………. Joe Morton
Warren Feur ……………. James Remar
Mary Feur ……………… Miranda Otto
