What Lies Beneath Was All Wrong
What Lies Beneath was one of the highest-grossing films when it was released back in 2000, but for one reason or another, I never actually saw it until recently.
My younger brother had watched the film back in the day and remembered not caring for it all that much. Still, he wanted to give it a second chance to see if the film held up better than he remembered and I wanted to experience it for the first time to see if I had maybe missed a cinematic gem.
The unfortunate answer is no. What Lies Beneath is mediocre at best, but instead of being a review, I wanted to take a moment to talk about what this particular film could and should have been with a few minor story tweaks.
What Lies Beneath is a handsome film and has some decent moments of tension and scares, but the story devolves into predictable monotony and takes no risks with the material to do anything memorable.
The trailer for What Lies Beneath is the perfect metaphor for this because it literally gives away the entire plot of the movie, which kind of defeats the point for a supernatural thriller such as this.
For anyone who’s seen the film, we eventually learn that Harrison Ford’s character, Norman, had an affair with one of his students — and as these things always do — the relationship goes south.
As Norman tries to call the relationship off, the young woman goes suicidal, and Norman is forced to kill her.
The deeds of his past literally come back to haunt him when the young woman’s spirit begins to haunt Norman’s wife, Claire, who is played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
But as I mentioned, nothing is surprising about this. The entire film spends all of its energy marking sure that we know that Norman is the bad guy. This fact makes it so that when the final revelations come, they’re really not revelations at all.
But it didn’t have to be this way. While watching the film, it struck me that the story could have been so much more, and my mind couldn’t resist trying to make it better.
And the sad part is that it didn’t take much effort.
Here’s what What Lies Beneath should have been.
During the course of the film in its original structure, we learn that not only did Norman have an affair with the young woman, but that Claire had discovered the two together. As she’s driving away in a fit of rage, she suffers a car crash that conveniently wipes her memories of the whole ordeal. It was only due to the hauntings of the student’s spirit that her memories begin to surface once again.
But…what if the killer had been Claire instead of Norman the whole time?
When this thought crossed my mind, it struck me that this would have led to a much more satisfying conclusion. In more ways than one, the story beats seem to allude to the fact that there is more going on with Claire’s character than meets the eye, but it never bothers to explore this side of her character.
In fact, as the plot thickens, Michell Pfeiffer continually develops a witch-like glint in her eyes that seems to be sinister in nature, but this particular thread never seems to go anywhere.
So what if — in an alternate scenario — after discovering the affair, Claire descends into a murderous rampage and drowns the young woman in the lake, only to lose control and crash her car?
Changing this aspect would have been so much more satisfying for multiple reasons. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it would have been a plot twist had the story occurred this way, but at least the plot would have been more interesting.
This simple change could have taken the story in interesting directions.
For instance, What Lies Beneath plays heavily into the supernatural side of its story, but what if all of the hauntings that Claire experiences aren’t paranormal at all, but are instead simply memories of her murderous past coming back to haunt her psychologically and fill in the gaps of her memory?
This would have made the film infinitely more interesting because, for the first three-quarters of the film, it would have had us guessing, trying to figure out if the ghostly apparitions were real or imagined.
While some of the psychological thriller aspects of What Lies Beneath are solid, the supernatural side of the story is by far one of the weaker points of the story.
As such, it would have been far more interesting to see it allude to the supernatural only for it to have all been in Claire’s head the entire time; a byproduct of her fractured state after the car crash.
On top of that, changing Claire to be the killer would have had us guessing as to who the killer was since both she and Norman would have become increasingly more suspect as the story progressed.
While this plot change wouldn’t have necessarily made What Lies Beneath a classic, it at least would have been more memorable than what it turned out to be.
I love deep psychological thrillers that keep me guessing throughout the course of the story, and ultimately, that’s exactly where What Lies Beneath falls short.
I never had to guess.
