Buy it... if you are prepared to appreciate a technically adept adaptation of Bernard Herrmann's score from Psycho for the horror sequences in What Lies Beneath.

Avoid it... if the surprisingly and disappointingly mundane and sparse orchestration of Alan Silvestri's suspense cues for the first half of the film cannot compensate for those snappy moments of Herrmann inspiration later on.

Silvestri

What Lies Beneath: (Alan Silvestri) Was this film supposed to serious or was it meant to be satire? A film like What Lies Beneath proves that it truly doesn't matter if you place a director like Robert Zemeckis behind the camera and actors like Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer in front of it; if your screenplay is atrocious, then the film better rely on the humorous antics of the actors in order to survive. Unfortunately, newcomer Clark Gregg's screenplay for this film was so uninspired and predictable that critics universally twisted in their seats... not out of fright, but out of boredom. Ford and Pfeiffer are a wealthy couple who move to a mansion on the edge of a Vermont lake, and, just on cue, a whole slew of ghostly things start happening. One of the only redeeming aspects of What Lies Beneath was an attempt by Zemeckis to raise small tributes to the master of horror, Alfred Hitchcock. Some of these references were built into the script, with some elements stolen from Psycho and Rear Window, while others involved the typical flair for camera angles and movement. Another element of the film that was saturated with Hitchcock flavor was Alan Silvestri's score, which owes so much to Bernard Herrmann that it's hard to refer to the music from What Lies Beneath as being an original work. The collaboration between Zemeckis and Silvestri has been extremely fruitful over the years, but What Lies Beneath was their first horror venture together. They were reportedly working on two projects concurrently in 2000, with What Lies Beneath not even wrapped up in post-production before the two began looking forward to production on the more popularly anticipated fall release, Cast Away (despite the latter film containing only a few minutes of score material). Perhaps Zemeckis and Silvestri already knew what film and score critics were going to say about What Lies Beneath, and you're about to hear a representative dose of that criticism in the words below.

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It was immediately recognized when What Lies Beneath was finally released that the music for the film, at its best, alternated between rather mundane, stock, horror underscore and wildly obvious tributes to Herrmann's score from Psycho. As for the eerie parts of the underscore, segments that are more likely to be described as being in tune with Silvestri's own styles, there could be comparisons made to Jerry Goldsmith's concurrent Hollow Man. What's surprising about What Lies Beneath is that Silvestri so rarely flies on autopilot, and the fact that he produced such an uninteresting score for this project is more representative of the kind of predictability from which Goldsmith has suffered through his series of equally questionable projects through the 1990's. The suspense cues in What Lies Beneath are a succession of cliched horror ideas, using a regular studio orchestra to provide one or two moderately cohesive motifs while meandering through each section of the ensemble alone for extended sequences. Only halfway through the album release does Silvestri begin to open the doors of horror with an effective crescendo in "Forbidden Fruit." From there, we hear a hint of James Horner's dense ideas from Aliens, though most of the material owes significant inspiration to Herrmann's Psycho. Entire 30-second flashes of action --once What Lies Beneath turns from suspense to horror-- can be attributed to both the preludes to Psycho and, to a lesser extent, Vertigo. The use of brass and timpani for the more rhythmic chase sequences will remind heavily of Torn Curtain. The praise that you did hear associated with the score at the time of its release was mostly directed at these moments of Herrmann imitation, and while Silvestri obviously did it intentionally (and likely as a result of direction from the filmmakers), it's hard to get the impression that there's anything truly fresh in What Lies Beneath. That's a surprising statement considering how unique Silvestri's scores typically sound, especially in orchestration. On album, this was one of Varèse Sarabande's later notable "under-30 minute" products, and as such, there really is no reason, beyond the technical intrigue of hearing Herrmann's music adapted, to buy this score. **   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Alan Silvestri reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.34 (in 32 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.27 (in 30,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.