What Lies Beneath

Decent, but too routine thriller relies on quality star cast led by Harrison Ford and professional, experienced direction by R. Zemeckis. Good entertainment at first glance, but I don't feel the need to revisit this film. In this case, I also disliked the combination of a criminal case with supernatural elements. Overall impression with squinted eyes: 70%. (14/06/2006)

The most entertaining thing about Zemeckis is that you never know if his next work will receive the loudest applause and enchant the viewer with perfect filmmaking or if he will embarrass himself in a genre shootout and suddenly lose the respect of his fans with a gaping flaw. A horror without atmosphere, with an unfinished twist ending and several rather disturbing jump scares. Everything here is for the sake of effect, and unfortunately, completely out of place. (24/03/2005)

What Lies Beneath is Robert Zemeckis' first foray into horror that isn't comedic but is taken seriously. It's evident that he's capable of taking the basic building blocks of the contemporary horror genre and creating a scare scene, but it just didn't feel right to me; it felt contrived and didn't work as well as the creators might have hoped. The effort was good, but the result didn't impress that much. (29/12/2016)

I saw it in the darkness of an empty cinema, and I was scared. The last time something like this happened was two years ago with Raimi's The Gift. Zemeckis is a great director who plays with the viewer like a cat with a mouse and although I don't like ghost stories, I enjoyed this likeable horror film, including the final half hour, which blew me away. Just when you expected the climax, there was another and another, and surprisingly I didn't feel like I was being set up at all. Whether it's an homage to Hitchcock, or a rip-off of Hitchcock and all that blah blah blah, I don't care. PS: Years later I watched it a second time and it didn't have the same power. But still, very good job Mr Zemeckis! (15/06/2003)

Robert Zemeckis’s directing is decent, but the screenwriting is so hackneyed and riddled with thriller clichés that it’s mind-numbing! And Silvestri’s rip-off of Herrmann’s music from Psycho is like a fist to the face! Though Silvestri and Zemeckis intended What Lies Beneath to be an homage to the beloved Hitchcock, they forgot the difference between paying tribute and cheap imitation. Shame on them. (12/04/2002)