What Lies Beneath

Strange phenomena plague a university wife (Michelle Pfeiffer); she learns to her horror that it may be the ghost of a woman who had an affair with her husband (Harrison Ford). And no, in case you’re worrying, the preview trailer does not give the whole plot away. Clark Gregg and Sarah Kernochan’s story has some clever twists, though at 130 minutes, it’s a bit protracted for this kind of folderol, and they nearly ruin everything with the cheap teen-slasher trick of a “dead” killer springing back to life. On the plus side, director Robert Zemeckis gives the film a high decorator gloss—it’s like a Stephen King story set in an issue of Martha Stewart Living—with several moments of delicious terror; the climactic moment alone, underwater with a floating corpse, redeems much that goes before.