What Lies Beneath (2000)

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Is Michelle Pfeiffer seeing a ghost in her lakeside home, or is she just losing her mind? That’s the premise behind this intimate thriller from director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back to the Future). Pfeiffer does a fine job and Harrison Ford is interestingly cast as her husband, a role that turns out to be more against his type than you’d imagine. The story is a little too thin to fill out a feature film — the script throws in a red herring or two to pad things out, but the third act pays off the ‘slow burn’ preceding it. Zemeckis largely resists his tendency to incorporate gratuitous special effects, which makes a three-hundred-sixty degree camera angle in the climax stand out (in a bad way). The bathtub scene is by far the best in the entire film, and probably the inspiration around which the rest of the script was forged. Diana Scarwid, James Remar, and Miranda Otto make the most of their minor screen time.

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