What Lies Beneath? Nothing good, babe!

I just watched the thriller What Lies Beneath (2000) for the first time

Just a heads up: I am going to spoil the entire plot of What Lies Beneath, which is a thriller and kind of depends on you not knowing what happens. However, I think I might be the last person on this planet who didn’t know what happened in What Lies Beneath. It came out in 2000, when I was at the perfect age to watch a movie that seemed very “grown up” but wasn’t necessarily all that scary (unless you are afraid of Ouija boards, which I was because of the film Witchboard), and yet I didn’t see it back then.

What Lies Beneath was on my mind recently because of this very good essay on The Reveal, “Did the Trailer for What Lies Beneath Ruin the Movie?” Well, as someone who has now seen the movie: yes. The trailer tells you every single thing that happens in that film! The piece also includes a very funny quote from Roger Ebert: “The modern studio approach to trailers is copied from those marketing people who stand in the aisles of supermarkets, offering you a bite of sausage on a toothpick. When you taste it, you know everything there is to be known about the sausage, except what it would be like to eat all of it. Same with the trailer for What Lies Beneath.”

Literally nobody is doing it like Rog these days.

All this to say that I will now be describing the plot of the film in detail, so don’t proceed unless you’ve seen it or you are one of the readers who tell me that you like to read my posts about movies you’ll never watch (I treasure these comments).

We begin with Claire (Michelle Pfieffer) living her best Barefoot Contessa life but in Vermont instead of the Hamptons, by which I mean she has a very nice kitchen, a beautiful big house, a giant garden, and a loving husband (Harrison Ford, who has a character name but I will not be using it). Claire has just sent her only daughter off to college, and Harrison Ford is mostly excited that this means they can have sex whenever. One thing this movie wants us to know: these people are hot for each other.

But Claire is fragile. We know this because people keep asking her if she’s okay after her “accident” last year. She crashed her car into a tree but somehow survived, and her one friend, Jody, checks in on her often. Jody rules because she’s into the occult, and I strongly believe everyone needs one friend who can do a tarot reading, interpret your dreams, or give you a crystal that’s relevant to your life. And if you don’t have that friend…maybe you need to be that friend.

What a life! Or is it…?

Claire also has an incurable case of Chronic Movie Symbolism. She keeps breaking (or cutting herself on) glass, hurting herself in her home, walking past mirrors, etc. Everything is always wet—it’s raining, there’s a bath, there’s a lake. I love stuff like this in movies, even when it’s extremely heavy-handed. This is one of the things films can do that novels cannot, so I think we need to lean into the visual symbolism. Look into mirrors more often, I say!

It’s with this fragile mindset and her inability to stop hurting herself that Claire finds herself getting obsessed with her neighbors. The husband, Warren Feur (one must stop to ask…why did they pick a last name that’s hard to say and spell?), is a professor at the college where Harrison Ford works as both a professor and scientist. The wife, Mary, is constantly crying. Claire has one weird conversation with Mary through the fence (during which, of course, Claire cuts herself) and then…Mary’s nowhere to be seen.

Claire goes full Rear Window…she’s Jimmy Stewart but without the broken leg, using binoculars to peer over into their neighbors’ house. Through a series of, honestly, pretty convincing clues she becomes convinced that Warren murdered Mary. There’s a shoe with blood on it (I mean, why WAS there a shoe with blood on it?), she sees Warren hauling something that looks like a body into his car during a thunderstorm…worst of all, Claire brings over a bottle of wine and some cut flowers from her beautiful garden and he dumps out the flowers?? Even if he’s not a murderer, he’s rude, and one might say that being rude to Michelle Pfeiffer is its own crime.

Harrison Ford is like “Claire, this is my coworker, you need to stop accusing him of murder” but Claire is a woman obsessed. Also, in her defense, some weird stuff is happening. Like a framed picture keeps falling on the ground and breaking (you KNOW Claire is gonna cut herself on that glass). Also the bathtub mysteriously fills with water and then Claire sees a horrifying specter in it. You know, normal stuff. Claire is like, “yeah this house is haunted” but Harrison Ford is a scientist who doesn’t believe in that kind of thing. No ghosts, only science. I will say that if my bathtub was filling itself with water I would at the very least want to investigate the plumbing. Even if you don’t have a haunting, you’re going to end up with some significant water damage, but I guess scientists don’t care about that!

Luckily, Claire has a Spiritual Friend, and when she asks Jody to come over for a seance, Jody’s like, “Say less, my ouija board is already in the car.” They’ve got candles and they’re ready to commune with the spirit of Claire’s presumably dead neighbor. But then the candles blow out. Honestly, it’s kind of a bust as seances go, and Claire thinks that maybe she’s overreacting. But then the bathtub fills with water again and the ghost leaves a message in the steam on the mirror (“YOU KNOW”…that you need to fix this massive leak OR call an exorcist). AND THEN, omg, I didn’t even tell you that Claire looooves to play Solitaire on her big old computer. What can I say, it’s the year 2000. Well, the ghost logs onto the computer, opens up Solitaire, and covers the screen with their own high score initials: MEF. So now Claire’s being haunted and her high score was beaten—talk about bad luck.

“MEF” means “Mary Feur” to Claire, so she confronts Warren at a party in front of all Harrison Ford’s smart professor friends, and it turns out…Mary is there at the party. Don’t you hate it when you falsely accuse your husband’s colleague of murder? Mary comes over and tells her some bonkers story about how she temporarily left Warren because she loves him TOO much or something…I mean, the girl’s caught in a bad romance, but this cannot be Claire’s problem. She’s got that whole bathtub situation to deal with.

But don’t worry…that picture frame tosses itself onto the ground again and Claire finally notices that, on the back of the picture of Harrison Ford receiving an award, there’s a newspaper article about a missing girl named Madison Elizabeth Frank. The very initials of a ghost Solitaire champion.

So she does what anyone else would do: she finds Madison’s mom and lies her way into the house, where she steals a braid of Madison’s hair so she can use it in her witchcraft (because Jody gave her an old witch book that she’s apparently been poring over when she wasn’t trying to solve a murder investigation that went nowhere…hopefully she’ll make a better witch than detective).

According to the witch book, you need something of the deceased’s to channel their spirit. Claire is able to channel Madison and seduce Harrison Ford in character, which then helps her unlock a repressed memory…Harrison Ford was having an affair with Madison, his grad student, and Claire found this out right before her car accident!

She goes to stay with Jody and frankly, I wish she would’ve stayed there. But she comes back home to find Harrison Ford unconscious in the bathtub with a hair dryer…the paramedics revive him and he insists it was an accident, but do you think Claire is going to leave this man after he may have tried to end his own life? Of course not. She’s an amateur sleuth, she’s a burgeoning witch, but she’s also his wife and she wants to make things work. Claire believes Harrison Ford when he says that he ended his affair with Madison and she was distraught, threatening to kill herself.

In case you haven’t seen the trailer, it tells you about his affair. We’re in, like, the last half hour of the movie. Talk about spoilers.

Claire is trying to make things work with Harrison Ford, going out on their boat and living their best Vermont life, but she’s still drawn to the water. Almost as if she needs to know…what lies beneath. Well, it’s a locked box right off the edge of their dock, and Claire dives in one night to grab it and unlock it with a key that the ghost of Madison Elizabeth Frank helped her find. Guess what’s in it? Madison Elizabeth’s necklace! Because Harrison Ford says he had to dump her body after she swallowed a bunch of pills and died in their house! The revelation of her death and their affair would’ve ruined his career and marriage, and he begs Claire to forgive him and keep the secret.

Claire isn’t interested in keeping things hidden, and she tells Harrison Ford that he needs to tell the police what happened. So he dials 911, tells them to come out to the house because he has information about a missing person, and then goes upstairs to shower. While he’s in that cursed shower, Claire gets suspicious. She grabs their cordless phone, hits redial, and…it’s 411. HARRISON FORD DIDN’T CALL 911 AND HE’S RIGHT BEHIND HER WITH A CLOTH SOAKED IN HALOTHANE (this was foreshadowed earlier on in Harrison Ford’s lab, when an assistant gave a long and completely out of place speech about how halothane paralyzes the mice’s bodies while keeping them awake and alert).

He confesses to her that he totally did kill Madison, he faked his own bathtub accident to appear sympathetic, and now he’s going to kill Claire by making it look like she drowned herself in that haunted bathtub. A movie where Harrison Ford is the bad guy? Wow. But then the ghost of Madison temporarily inhabits Claire’s body and scares Harrison Ford (#womensupportingwomen), causing him to stumble backwards and hit his head on the sink. Slippery bathroom floors can be so dangerous, even/especially when you’re trying to murder your wife.

Claire uses every last ounce of her strength to pull the drain out of the tub with her toes, saving her own life at the last minute. The halothane wears off enough that she can stumble out of the tub and downstairs (is this an accurate depiction of how halothane works? I cannot tell you how little I care!), where Harrison Ford is passed out and bleeding on the floor, holding the phone. More foreshadowing from earlier in the film: we learn that they don’t get cell signal until they’re halfway across the bridge, so Claire grabs the phone and the keys and takes Harrison Ford’s truck, with the boat attached, and floors it toward the bridge.

But if you guessed that Harrison Ford wasn’t as passed out as we thought, you guessed right. He’s in the back of the truck! He’s trying to kill her! He steers them into the water and refuses to let Claire out, attempting to drown her for the second time in like fifteen minutes.

Thankfully, the ghost of noted computer solitaire pro Madison Elizabeth Frank is also with them. And her body is with them, too, because this is exactly where Harrison Ford sank her car after he killed her. She manages to grab him, letting Claire escape.

The movie ends abruptly with Claire placing a flower on Madison Elizabeth Frank’s grave. I hope Claire’s okay—that was so much trauma. Maybe Jody can give her a therapeutic tarot reading or recommend a crystal for when your husband tries to kill you multiple times.

Some fun facts:

-What Lies Beneath was written by Clark Gregg. THIS Clark Gregg!

-According to my research (Wikipedia), “What Lies Beneath was filmed while production of Cast Away took a hiatus to allow Tom Hanks to lose weight and grow a beard.” Imagine, you’re Robert Zemeckis and you have some free time, so you’re like “Might as well film a thriller starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer…what ELSE do I have to do?”

-Bless whoever wrote this bit of IMDB trivia: “In The Fugitive (1993), Ford plays a character desperately trying to prove he didn't kill his wife. In this film, he plays a character who desperately tries to kill his wife.”

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Now that I’ve told you the entire plot, have a look at the trailer, which really does give everything away.

In contrast, a couple of nights ago we watched the 2024 Daisy Ridley thriller Magpie, which we loved. It’s a very fun, noir-ish twisty thriller and the trailer gave me almost nothing, other than a general vibe (crying baby, Daisy Ridley being stressed). Which is great—it made me want to see the movie but didn’t spoil the fun. Nothing bad happens to children in the movie, in case you’re worried about that. But watching it right after watching What Lies Beneath…well, I don’t really trust men at the moment! Magpie is streaming on Hulu.

Please tell me all your What Lies Beneath thoughts. I’m sorry if I spoiled the movie for you, but to be fair I gave you many warnings. Also please recommend any thrillers…they are probably my favorite movies to watch because they’re creepy without being scary or having too much action (my nemesis). I wrote this on a time crunch, so please remember that any typos or errors are a result of me being human, just like you. Consider them a feature. A gift, even!

See you next week. xo