tek's rating: meh and three quarters

What Lies Beneath (PG-13)
Amblin; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Google Play; iTunes; Max; Vudu; YouTube

Caution: potential spoilers

This came out in 2000, but I didn't see it until 2022. I had it listed on my "psychological horror movies I want to see" page, but while there is some of that in the movie, I ultimately decided to put it under "thrillers" and also link to it from "supernatural horror". It definitely has some scary ghostly elements, but the really scary antagonist is not a ghost. I want to say that I almost liked the movie, but not quite. It's a shame, because the screenplay was written by Clark Gregg, whose acting (in other things) I apparently like more than his writing. Also, it was directed by Robert Zemeckis, whose work I usually like more than this.

Michelle Pfeiffer plays Claire Spencer, who I think has recently moved into a new house with her husband, Norman (Harrison Ford), and their daughter, Caitlin. (I guess the house used to belong to Norman's late father, and they've renovated it.) At the start of the movie, Caitlin goes away to college, and isn't seen again (though she is mentioned later). So she's of no real importance to the story. There are also a couple of neighbors who moved in next door even more recently, Mary and Warren Feur. The Spencers haven't met the Feurs yet, but they can't help overhearing them argue (and later have sex). One day, Claire overhears Mary crying, and asks (through the fence) if she's okay. Mary doesn't give any clear answers, but she seems scared, presumably of her husband. Meanwhile, Claire begins hearing and seeing strange things in her home, and comes to believe the house is haunted. She thinks it's by Mary, who has disappeared, and Claire believes Warren killed her. However, it later turns out Mary had just gone away for awhile, and is just fine. After that, Claire eventually comes to believe the ghost is that of a college student named Madison Elizabeth Frank, who had gone missing a year ago. Also around that time, Claire had had a car accident, and I couldn't help but wonder if the things she was seeing and hearing were caused by some latent brain damage, or something. Actually, I think at least part of her experiences may have been caused by repressed memories from before the crash. But there's definitely also a ghost involved.

Beyond that, I don't want to say anything about the plot. There were some things about it that I found off-puttingly strange or even silly, but on the whole I thought it was okay. I'm still not sure how well the supernatural and non-supernatural elements meshed. It almost seemed like a mashup of two different movies, rather than a cohesive whole. (But I suppose either part alone would have been too short to make a complete movie.) Anyway, I just couldn't get as into it as I would have liked. But at least it was good enough to keep me interested enough to keep watching the whole thing. And I did kind of like how it ended, despite the oddness of the genre mashup.


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