Here’s another textbook example of a film’s preview giving away too much of its plot.  What Lies Beneath is a full three-quarters over before you get to the content revealed in the trailer.  Fortunately, it doesn’t much matter – Beneath is a taut psychological thriller that would make Hitchcock proud.  In fact, it could do for bathtubs what Hitch’s Psycho did for showers.

Beneath features Harrison Ford (Random Hearts) and Michelle Pfeiffer (The Story of Us), two stars with box office clout fading faster than the Baltimore Orioles' chance at a playoff berth.  They play Dr. Norman and Claire Spencer, a genetic biologist and an ex-concert cellist, respectively.  They live in a picturesque waterfront Vermont home that was formerly owned by Norman’s recently deceased father.

While Norman is completely consumed by his work, Claire stays at home and begins to experience strange and spooky stuff in their new house.  It’s your typical poltergeist fare – doors opening on their own, pictures crashing to the floor – but nobody’s sure if it’s just Claire suffering from Empty Nest Syndrome (her only daughter just left for college) or if she’s really experiencing some type of otherworldly force.  And if Claire is being haunted by an apparition, whose ghost is it?  Norman’s dead father or perhaps the Spencers' new neighbor, who Claire believes was murdered?  In an homage to Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Claire thinks she sees her body being removed from the house one night in the pouring rain.  Like I said, if you’ve seen the trailer, you already know the answer.

Claire also seems to be suffering from selective amnesia, forgetting important events that happened in her life, especially those surrounding a social event where Norman was awarded a Chair at a prestigious University.  The whole role kind of reminded me of Emma Thompson in Kenneth Branagh’s wonderful Dead Again.  Claire has to piece her own life back together with virtually no help from her unsympathetic husband, who seems to only care that her kookiness is inconveniencing his career.

There are about a dozen jump-out-of-your-skin moments in Beneath.  You can see most of them coming, but they’re so well done that it doesn’t matter.  The ending is very maddening and takes so long to develop (about thirty minutes) that people at my screening nearly became physically ill.  I can’t ever recall being at a film before and hearing a group of men shouting out loud in fear or a woman shrieking at the top of her lungs. Beneath is a terrific popcorn thriller that plays better than The Sixth Sense and its sucker-punch ending.  Just don’t eat too much popcorn.

Pfeiffer gives one of her best performances ever, but Ford has just turned into a really bad actor.  He’s becoming more and more like Frankenstein with each film he makes.  I’m not sure if he’s actually wooden or just grumpy.  Even Beneath’s tagline could be interpreted as a poke at the fifty-eight-year-old actor – “He was the perfect husband until his one mistake followed them home.”  What was it?  Sabrina?  Six Days, Seven Nights?  Random Hearts?  It doesn’t matter – when Ford takes off his shirt, studio executives roll around in money like Demi Moore in Indecent Proposal.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Contact) fills Beneath with a bunch of technically dazzling long shots, some of which left me scratching my head and wanting to see the film again.  He’s one of the better mainstream directors out there, and the fact that Zemeckis and crew are able to sustain such a level of sheer terror for the last thirty minutes is a real testament to the director and the script, which was written by Clark Gregg.  Beneath is Gregg’s debut screenplay, but he’s appeared in a myriad of films with amazing scripts (Magnolia, The Usual Suspects, The Spanish Prisoner) and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award last year for his performance in The Adventures of Sebastian Cole.

Zemeckis, who won an Oscar for Forrest Gump, reassembled his top-notch crew for Beneath (namely, editor Arthur Schmidt, cinematographer Don Burgess, score-meister Alan Silvestri and production designer Rick Carter – all Oscar nominees for Gump).  They do a fantastic job of making a beautiful lakefront home seem warm, cozy and inviting, as well as creepy, ominous and terrifying.  Beneath is the first of two potential blockbusters helmed by Zemeckis this year - Cast Away, which re-teams the director with Gump star Tom Hanks, is set to be released this Christmas.

2:08 - for terror/violence, sexual content and mild adult language