WHAT LIES BELOW Review – A Surprisingly Slippery Thriller
Drew Tinnin
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Directed by Braden D. Duemmier
Written by Braden D. Duemmier
Starring Ema Horvath, Trey Tucker, Mena Suvari
At first glance, director Braden Duemmier’s What Lies Below seems like a fairly straight forward, even somewhat generic rehash of gone by thrillers. We’ve seen the story before: an outsider uses his or her seductive power to pit a family against each other. Sure, it has a bit of a Lifetime quality and unabashedly takes from better, more stylized thrillers like Adam Wingard’s The Guest, but luckily there’s quite a bit more going on under the surface. Mostly thanks to the oddball performance of Trey Tucker as the mysterious John Smith, What Lies Below really works as a sexy, sci-fi thriller that definitely has a will to be weird.
Fresh off the bus from science camp, Liberty (Horvath) is a proud geek with a quiet attention for detail, so she immediately notices a change in her freewheeling mother Michelle (Suvari) as they both prepare for a relaxing retreat at their family cabin. In that classic slo-mo Daniel Craig Bond introduction kind of way, the staggeringly in shape new boyfriend, John Smith (Tucker), breaches the lake water after a dip. He meets a mouth agape Liberty who is still trying to process how and why her Mom is hooking up with this bohunk – who also happens to be a nerdy marine biologist. Too perfect? Yes.
Naturally, Liberty is suspicious and, as John starts sleep walking and generally acting weird, she becomes more and more convinced that he may actually be some cross between a merman and Jeff Bridges in Starman. Her imagination can’t help but run a little too wild but it’s obvious from the get-go that something fishy is going on.
It’s fitting that the teenaged Liberty is the one who feels most isolated and alone as her mother falls deeper and deeper under the spell of her new beau. Horvath plays Liberty with an endearing sense of naiveté making Mena Suvari’s exellent turn as a selfish Mom even more of a betrayal to their close knit family bond. They both give solid performances, but the perfect imperfections of Trey Tucker’s turn as John Smith are what make What Lies Below truly compelling. He’s a total oddball inside of a perfect looking being and that’s unsettling on a base level.
Duemmier’s script takes a few cues from Nabokov’s Lolita but, thankfully, never fully commits to a total seduction of John Smith over the innocent Liberty. Once the story opens up and reveals the sinister intentions of Smith, what started off as a melodramatic tale switches gears becoming a sort of twisted science project. The more digging Liberty does, the more she learns that the local marine life may not be the only thing that the man calling himself John Smith is experimenting on.
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What Lies Below
Summary
What Lies Below has a lot more going on below the surface than horror fans might think at first glance.
