What lies beneath Pfeiffer film?
This wildly, but effectively, overwrought thriller – with added horror – arrives touting dazzling credentials: an idea by Steven Spielberg, directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer. Under the weight of such a curtain call, the biggest surprise is, perhaps, that what emerges is no masterpiece, but a semi-sophisticated shocker, playfully homaging Hitchcock like a mechanical masterclass in doing ‘genre’. The first hour is great fun. Slowburning and suggestive, the mystery builds from all directions, with supernatural pointers, strange keys, a neighbour’s wife going mysteriously absent, and various hints of a troubled past. Pfeiffer – who carries the movie – looks svelte and vulnerable, and through the slow-slow-quick rhythm nicely evokes the fraught air of a poor soul simultaneously having to question her own sanity and the existence of the paranormal. It is in the midriff that the movie really sags. Domestic trauma takes over, events become talky and flat
