Video Review

Wife and Death (2001)

Michelle Pfeiffer finds ghosts in hubby Harrison Ford's closet in What Lies Beneath.

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Credits

Release Date: Jul 21, 2000; Rateds: PG-13, R; Video Release Date: Jan 30, 2001; Genres: Mystery, Suspense, Thriller; With: Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer; Distributor: 20th Century Fox Film Corporation

B+

By Ty Burr

Ty Burr

Ty Burr is a writer at large for EW and is no relation to Raymond or Aaron

Famously filmed during the hiatus between Fat Tom and Skinny Tom in Cast Away, What Lies Beneath represents director Robert Zemeckis' contribution to those beloved old Help!-My-suave-husband-may-actually-be-a-psychotic-killer melodramas. Pioneered by Gaslight and Suspicion, more recently addressed in Double Jeopardy, the genre's a nerve-wracking Baedeker to subterranean female fears of entrapment, abandonment, and betrayal.

Zemeckis, fascinatingly, lets the subtext bubble up by taking his own sweet time: Scary-movie junkies weaned on Scream may be bored to tears watching professor's wife Michelle Pfeiffer hesitatingly amass evidence that may or may not implicate husband Harrison Ford in the death of a comely student. There's a looong red herring involving the neighbors, a ghost who may or may not be Casper-friendly, and lots of opaque silences -- this may be the quietest fright flick in years.

Well, sorry, kids, this is your parents' horror movie: a troubling, perceptive relationship drama that just happens to feature poltergeists and blood spatters. Pfeiffer, in particular, is so spookily attuned to her character -- a ''contented'' empty-nest mom slowly waking up to utter loneliness -- that the film becomes as pointed about love's loss as The Story of Us was glib. In the end, What Lies Beneath never quite breaks free of genre cliche, but Zemeckis has still pulled off a beguiling stunt: He's remade A Doll's House as a Hitchcock movie. B+

WHAT WE SAID THEN: ''The rampant sampling and storytelling overload -- prevalent movie weaknesses these days -- result in parts greater than the sum of the whole.'' B (#551/552, July 28, 2000) -- Lisa Schwarzbaum

[BOX]

What Lies Beneath 2000 DREAMWORKS 130 MINUTES RATED R ALSO ON DVD

Posted Jan 26, 2001

More

Movie Review What Lies Beneath (Jul 21, 2000) | Lisa Schwarzbaum
Video Review What Lies Beneath | Ty Burr
Movie Review What Lies Beneath (Jul 21, 2000)
Cover Story WHAT LIES BENEATH
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