WHAT LIES BENEATH

Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Starring Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer

Cheesy and manipulative in the extreme, but unfailingly competent and well-executed, What Lies Beneath represents the ever-reliable, never-original Zemeckis' attempt to do Hitchcock, a task which he just about pulls off. What Lies Beneath is an atmospheric ghost-story most obviously indebted to Dial M for Murder, replete with glacial blonde-in-terror, creaking doors, madwomen-in-attics and jump-out-of-skin sudden starts: it's extremely effective as a pure thriller, if thoroughly guilty of by-the-numbers calculation.

Claire (an increasingly emaciated Pfeiffer) is a formerly-promising cellist who has given up her career to raise her daughter and be married to a house and doctor (Ford, in his usual form). When said daughter Caitlin leaves home, Claire believes she sees a corpse floating under the surface of the lake beside their idyllic all-American home - then, an encounter with an equally demented female neighbour prompts Claire to believe the whispering voices she now hears at night (while strenuously avoiding any use of light-bulbs) pertain to the bloody murder of said neighbour.If the whole set-up sounds perfunctory, it still makes for a superior ghost story: it relies almost entirely on tried-and-tested formulae (creaky doors, half-glimpsed reflections) but in doing so manages plenty in the way of visceral thrills, including the scariest cinematic deployment of a bath-tub since The Shining.

The whole thing maintains an intense, other-worldly Carnival of Souls-styled atmosphere, very possibly mindful of The Sixth Sense's gargantuan box-office success, and it appears to have gone down brilliantly with Stateside audiences. Ford adapts pretty well to his first remotely villanish role as a career-obsessed adulterer, although Pfeiffer is periodically out of her depth in a darker-than-usual outing. There's more than enough dramatic tension on offer to justify the film's existence, though not enough to make one ache for a second viewing.

Vacuous, but tense and creepy as hell, What Lies Beneath somehow qualifies as the best thing on offer this fortnight.