What Lies Below

7/22/2023

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 my

6/2/2024

**_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.