What a treat! This month's Bonus Episode: What Lies Beneath is available for all! No subscription required :)
PLEASE if you have not watched the movie, do that first and then listen to this episode!
My friend, Priscilla, stops in for a deep dive into why this psychological thriller still stings: Michelle Pfeiffer’s nerve and nuance, Harrison Ford’s brilliant portrayal, and Robert Zemeckis’s love letter to Hitchcock that uses mirrors, windows, and water to make the ordinary feel unsafe.
We unpack the film’s design from the ground up, including a Nantucket-style lake house built to glow in daylight and brood at dusk, multiple bathroom sets engineered for those impossible angles, and CGI used with restraint: steam that writes, reflections that betray, a ghost that returns for one exquisite moment of justice. The camera starts at eye level and sinks lower as dread rises, and Alan Silvestri’s score threads anxiety through every door creak and bathtub ripple. It’s meticulous craft serving a clean, propulsive plot: seance to possession, repressed memory to reveal, paralytic serum to bathtub suffocation, bridge crash to lakebed truth.
At the heart is a theme that still resonates-- how a woman’s intuition gets minimized when her evidence looks like superstition. Claire’s haunted house becomes a map of gaslighting—neighbors who might be violent, a husband who “cares,” a past smudged by trauma. Step by step, the film tests what we believe and why, until the lake gives up what the living tried to hide. Whether you think the marketing blunted the twist or simply reframed the suspense, the story’s spine holds: nothing stays buried forever.
If you loved the breakdown, check out our Bonus Episodes (available on Patreon or Apple Podcasts) for more smart deep dives!
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