The deliberate pace and eerie quiet of What Lies Beneath's opening scenes -- which show Claire Spencer (Michelle Pfeiffer), a Vermont housewife in the throes of empty-nest syndrome, gradually that there's a ghost in the house shares with her husband, Norman (Harrison Ford) -- generate a lot of expectations. In addition to suggesting that director Robert Zemeckis (Contact) is out to reclaim the horror film for adult audiences, such qualities offer the tantalizing hope that Pfeiffer -- who's as good as she's ever been -- might be getting welcome chance to carry a decent movie by herself. No such luck: Beneath is a classic case of bait-and-switch, a generic woman-in-ijeopardy flick disguised as sophisticated supernatural fare and overstuffed with red herrings. Ford is cast gainst type as a seemingly mild-mannered professor struggling to escape the shadow of his late father, but whenever he gets worked up, he starts barking at Pfeiffer like they're in a Tom Clancy movie and she's the terrorist, and his hysterics drown out a lot of the subtlety in her performance. A couple of fine suspense sequences (there's a very good reason for the bathtub shot on the poster) show Zemeckis to be at the top of his game stylistically, but Beneath still takes forever to get started -- then goes nowhere once it does. by Andrew johnston (2 stars)

Pfeiffer, a cellist turned homemaker, faces an empty nest. She has just sent her only daughter off to college. Her husband (Ford), a genetic researcher, is preoccupied with an important paper. That leaves Pfeiffer alone in her lakefront Vermont home. It's a gorgeous place, wood-shingled, with much of the interior painted a periwinkle blue and fitted out with what look like fixtures from Restoration Hardware. There's even a garden, where Pfeiffer grows roses. As the whispering leaves and buzzing cicadas provide accompaniment to her solitude, a sense of dread seeps in. Is she possessed by Martha Strewart?

Then another, more dangerous spirit arrives. A blonde who looks like Pfeiffer, this ghost mists up the bathroom, knocks over photos and is always gently tugging open the front door. Pfeiffer, not sure whether she needs a Ouija board or Prozac, begins to unravel. And how beautifully she falls apart. Like her cello, Pfeiffer is an exquisitely built, gleamingly polished instrument that pours forth a low, throbbing melody. She gives one of the summer's best performance. Ford, the least neurotic of leading men, is a comfortable match for her. As usual, his rumpled charm trails off imperceptibly into rumpled surliness.

Elegantly shot and teased along by small, sly touches of humor, Beneath aspires to the kind of sophisticated psycho-horror associated with such sick-puppy maestros as Alferd Hitchcock and Roman Polanski.

Director Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump) appears ready to pull it off, but then the movie takes one twist too many and skitters off into slick formula. The eye of corpse blinks open. The music shrieks. And Pfeiffer becomes as ditzy as a babysitter in a slasher movie. (PG-13) Bottom Line: A cut above most ghost stories. by Tom Gliatto.