It's a thriller and not a bad one; unfortunately it's very slow. Being a bit slow is sometimes good for a certain kind of thriller movies, but in my opinion here a few scenes are too slow. I know it's not an action movie, and I like all the scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer walking around, building her suspicions. That's how some thriller movies work right? There's a lot of calm then all of a sudden boom and you jump off your seat. Well, no boom here, because right before it there was too much calm, like they were whispering 'wait, hold your breath..' I mean, if you know when the boom is coming you don't jump off your seat!! I like it mostly because of the actors, I'll say. I'm uncertain about the supernatural side of it. They were not sure on the way to follow, maybe, because it is partially supernatural and partially psychological.
The story is: Claire (Pfeiffer) moves in a new house with her new husband Norman (Harrison Ford) who is a famous professor/scientist, and she spends her days alone since her only daughter just left for college. It's one year since she had a bad car accident, so everybody is concerned for her mental health now that she's all alone.
She hears a neighbour crying and meets Mary, but she's upset and doesn't explain why she's crying. One night she sees Mary's husband carrying a suspiciously looking package in the car trunk, and not seeing Mary anymore she convinces herself that he killed her, she even gets her friend Jody to try and contact Mary's spirit with a seance. She grows more and more sure of it to the point when she publicly comes up to him accusing him of having killed her: he's bewildered, but he has the best help he can get: his wife Mary comes to him after hearing her shout, clearing to her and everybody else that she's not dead! (Apparently that day she was crying, thinking to be all alone with no one hearing her, because she was rather emotional and found it difficult to be away from her beloved husband even for a while...)
Anyway, maybe the seance did contact a spirit, because she saw a message on the bathroom mirror and then the spirit of a girl apparently took over her body when Norman came home one day, finding her trying to seduce him like another girl did once. When Claire comes to her senses she finds she now remembers everything about her car accident: she couldn't before, but now she remembers storming out after seeing him with a girl, a student he was cheating on her with. That girl later on disappeared. Jody knew about the cheating husband, but didn't tell her because after the accident she was scared it might be too much for her fragile state.
Claire talks to Norman about it, and he admits he made a mistake, and also that the girl became obsessive and even came to his house where he found her, dead, and he panicked and put her body in a car and throw it in the lake. He calls the police to confess, but he was fooling nobody. I didn't believe it for an instant, and it took very little for Claire to doubt it too because she tried the redial and discovers he had not called the police after all!
He catches her before she can do anything, drugs her with something paralyzing and puts her into the bathtub, trying to stage her suicide. Norman sees in her the face of the girl he killed and scared falls and hits his head, giving Claire time to try and save herself: she manages to get out and into the car, but it turns out he got in it too. They fight and the car falls in the lake. Claire tries to get out when he grabs her, but the ghost of the girl comes again to her rescue against him, holding him down while she saves herself.
What I didn't like is that they seemed not sure if they wanted it supernatural or not. He saw the girl's necklace and then he saw her face instead of Claire's: was it a ghost or his guilty imagination?
He saw her ghost in the lake, but after his death we see her decomposed body floating in the water: was it really her ghost or was he imagining it when he was touched by the corpse?
Either way, supernatural or psychological, could have been ok in a thriller movie, I just wish they were more clear about it, one way or the other.
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