What Lies Beneath (2000)

Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her husband Norman (Harrison Ford) appear to have an ideal marriage and an ideal home. But the strain starts to show when Claire becomes convinced that their neighbour has murdered his wife. She also begins to observe spooky goings-on in her Vermont home, garden and lake. Norman encourages her to seek psychiatric help, but the weird events begin to escalate and it soon transpires that their marriage isn’t the fairytale story we might have imagined.

Director Robert Zemeckis does an excellent job with this Hitchcockian supernatural thriller. He’s masterful at storytelling (see Cast Away and the Back to the Future trilogy) and proves equally adept at building suspense. It’s genuinely frightening in places, not least because of the clever and claustrophobic way certain shots are framed.

The two leads are as good as ever, and Pfeiffer in particular builds a character you can easily believe in and relate to. There’s a major twist in the second half that changes everything, and both actors adapt their roles perfectly to make it work.

After an increasingly tense plot development, the pay off of the climax is extremely exciting. It’s real edge-of-the-seat stuff.

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