What Lies Below

When teenage "Liberty" (Ema Horvath) arrives to meet her mum's new boyfriend, you might be forgiven for thinking there was a double entendres in the title. He emerges toned and lithe from the water - à la Daniel Craig - and she is smitten. His pearly white smile and soon "John" (Trey Tucker) is the apple of her eye. That is until she begins to suspect that this person is just a bit too perfect. He swims the lake at all hours collecting samples of all kinds of creatures and pretty soon the preposterous nature of this ridiculous - but well produced - yarn come to the fore. The acting is almost as bad as the writing and were it not for the huskiness of the protagonist, I'd have long given up with this pretty desperate stuff. That they manage to string it out for ninety minutes is more of a mystery and the ending is something straight out of a 1970s episode of "Dr. Who". Disappointing on just about every level and certainly not worth bothering with - even for the eye candy.

Eerie cabin-in-the-woods flick with not enough Mena Suvari

A romance writer (Suvari) takes her 16 years-old daughter (Ema Horvath) to a lake house in the Adirondacks, where the teen meets her new hunky beau (Troy Iwata). He seems nice and they share a love for science, but he’s also kinda weird.

"What Lies Below" (2020) is a capably made slow-burn drama/mystery with a Northeastern woods’ milieu. It’s similar to "The Beach House" from the year prior (the one with Liana Liberato & Noah Le Gros) while the setting and tone (and title) are reminiscent of “What Lies Beneath” from two decades earlier, minus the ghostly element.

Amazingly, Ema was 25 during shooting, but looks & acts 16. She’s a really good actress, but the story focuses too much on her and bogs down in the middle. I would’ve preferred Mena being the protagonist (which of course would involve major changes to the story). There’s just not enough of her, but she has a worthwhile scene in jeans. She was 40 during filming playing the 42 years-old mother.

To appreciate this movie, you’ll have to be in the mode for a lowkey drama at a cabin-in-the-woods with eerie ambiance, not to mention handle a somewhat shocking climax with head-scratching ambiguity. If you need explosions every five minutes or everything spelled-out, stay away.

It runs 1 hour, 27 minutes, and was shot in upstate New York at Hudson Falls, which is on the Hudson River an hour’s drive north of Albany.

GRADE: B-