Movie Review: What Lies Below

credit: What Lies Below

Using a lakeside setting for a horror movie is usually a good idea and one that has been used over and over throughout the years. But some movies can make great use of the idea while others do their best but come up a bit short. What Lies Below is kind of an odd movie simply because it doesn’t feel as though it commits entirely to its own premise, as the reveals that are seen throughout the movie do help to tell the story, but they remain purposefully vague when laying things out. What is known is that Liberty, known as Libs or Libby, is a young girl that is entering womanhood and has been picked up from camp by her mother, an author of romantic novels that apparently has been trying to keep her career moving forward as sales have been down. What’s a little off-putting about Mena Suvari’s acting in this movie is that she comes off as the type of mother who loves her child but at the same time is somehow oblivious to the fact that her daughter is going through a transition in her life that could be alleviated with the type of help that might make life just a little easier. That’s kind of ruined when her mother announces that she has a new boyfriend.

credit: What Lies Below

It feels like the timeline could have been stretched to help with the realism the script needed. 

Watching as Liberty meets John, her mother’s new boyfriend, is kind of telling since Liberty doesn’t say it, but it’s easy to think that she’s not entirely comfortable with having John in their lives since it feels as though she and her mother are close enough that it might have been the two of them against the world for a while before John. But at one point in the movie, Liberty does mention that her mother has gone through other boyfriends and that this is a habit she has had for a while. The fact that Liberty doesn’t fully trust John but appears to get aroused by his naked body is also a very telling factor in this movie, as it builds the overall dynamic that keeps Liberty from falling under the same effect that her mother has when it comes to John. 

John’s creepy behavior continues throughout the movie as Liberty does her best to just deal with it and not upset her mother. 

From trying to mop up Libby’s menstrual blood to sniffing her through the shower curtain and even standing in her doorway as Libby pretends to be asleep, it’s fair to think that John is a bit of a creep, no matter how much he claims to love her mother. But when she witnesses John walking into the lake nearby, moving toward a strange, glowing red light that emanates from beneath the water, things only start to get weirder, especially when John appears behind her, quite dry. His excuse that he’s a sleepwalker is kind of thin, but Libby, who has no real evidence of who John is or what he’s about, continues to harbor her doubts. When her friend Marley comes over one night, Libby explains her doubts, and Marley makes it her business to speak to Libby’s mother, after which she disappears. John and her mother tell Libby that Marley went home while she was still asleep, which sounds dodgy, but is accepted for the time being. When Libby is in town and sees a man who looks just like John with his arm around another woman, her doubts only increase. 

credit: What Lies Below

The pacing of this movie feels kind of off. 

The movie doesn’t really feel as though it fails without question, but it does feel as though it slows down and then speeds up in a very inefficient manner that doesn’t do it any favors. Added to that is the feeling that it keeps a lot of secrets and reveals them in snippets that don’t give a lot of stuff away but somehow advance things in a manner that feels halting and not all that helpful. When it comes to finding out more about John, the audience is bound to be disappointed since there isn’t much that’s given about this character other than the fact that he’s not human and he’s trying to accomplish something that requires the sacrifice of human females. 

The ending is one of those that people might find confusing, not to mention anticlimactic. 

Once it’s established what John is doing, it’s easy to assume that whatever is in the lake is a part of the process that comes of creating the clones that are seen near the end of the movie. What isn’t certain is what they’re doing with the women they abduct and what their intentions might be moving forward.