There are many, many reasons to go back and rewatch Robert Zemeckis’s sleek 2000 thriller What Lies Beneath, his state-of-the-art stab at a Hitchcock. The timely autumnal atmosphere, the idyllic built-for-the-movie house, the two glamorous older stars, the one shock subversion of type and then there’s the horribly effective and highly ingenious suspense set piece involving a bathtub. Michelle Pfeiffer, in what was her last major studio lead performance, is trapped, paralysed by an experimental drug as water is rising. With Zemeckis and longtime cinematographer Don Burgess at their most playful, we follow her body shutting down and then in brief spurts, flashes of life, a struggle to survive using only random, unpredictable movements.
It’s a bravura sequence and one that was undoubtedly somewhere in the minds of the writers TJ Cimfel and David White as they came up with punchy, pre-Halloween Netflix chiller Don’t Move. It’s an extension of that unpleasant idea to an 85-minute runtime as a woman fights for her life while dealing with the effects of paralysis. Iris (Kelsey Asbille) is a grieving mother who becomes the latest target of a demented serial killer (Finn Wittrock), whom she meets in a remote forest when he pretends that he too is struggling with a major loss. But it’s a manipulative trap to lure her in before he injects a drug that will paralyse her, kicking off a desperate fight for survival as her body shuts down.
