The Reflection of What Lies Beneath

What Lies Beneath (2000) is a psychological thriller which is about a middle-age couple. It portrays that a couple who seem so happy together but, because of a sequence of unknown and weird things, the horrible truth is revealed.
Robert Zemeckis, the director, is good at film techniques, using the characteristics of the heroine from Rosemary's Baby and the classic plots from Rear Window, Psycho, and The Shining in What Lies Beneath. He tries to display such thriller genre with the elements in the time period of Alfred Hitchcock to the present audience. By a simple story he builds a mild, slow tempo at the first time, making it into an inflammable, drastic situation with Hitchcockian music composed by Alan Silvestri. He makes the cliché story, by tremendously stylistic camera movements, suspended.
Than saying Zemeckis mimics Hitchcock's gimmicks, I would rather say Hitchcock's tricks are exalted by him. In recent years, plenty of thrillers appeared, especially young American kinds; those are with incomplete composition, shallow characters, sanguinary scenes, and the intentional twist in the end, which have already became the common labels and the audience have got tired of them. Instead, What Lies Beneath used a few special effects and the ghost scenes to start a panic which can easily make audience heart attack.
Even though, in What Lies Beneath, the director still frightens his audience by using sudden sounds and formulaic scare in some parts, those are sturdy and basic equipments to maintain the pace in the film, like the presentation of the ghost in the beginning to make the audience awake when the movie portraying and foreshadowing the plot at first. With the slow progress, some branches of the story confusing the audience are gradually closured; then, the whole movie abruptly drives the plot towards the climax, raising the audience's curiosity on the road to the top tier. The last thirty minutes of the movie, which is the extreme climax, is brilliant, making me too flustered to barely even breathe until the satisfied ending.
What Lies Beneath is a successful entertaining work with high quality; from it, we can see the complete plot of a play, deep characterization, actress' hearty acting, the perfect harmony between shooting/composition and editing/pace, and the considerable and creative mirror scenes as the ways in Psycho. The director not merely arranges various kinds of brilliant film techniques in it to achieve the blockbuster but pay Hitchcock homage as well.