This is Robert Zemeckis’s attempt to emulate, and do homage to, Alfred Hitchcock. The trouble is, while he imports certain Hitchcockian elements, he fails to import Hitchcock’s style.

I won’t go too deeply into the story; there is a significant twist at the end, though I’m certain that a more cynical person than I am would have anticipated it easily. Norman (Harrison Ford) and Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer) live in an idyllic old house somewhere in rural Vermont; he is a world-renowned biologist and genetic engineer, she a former violinist who gave up her career to be a housewife. Things are going to be just beautiful once her (not his) daughter Caitlin has gone off to college and the two of them are alone together. But problems arise. First, Norman is heavily tied up in his work, perhaps aiming for a Nobel Prize. Second, the house appears to be haunted by the ghost of a young woman — doors are left open, pictures fall to the floor and shatter for no good reason, and Michelle vaguely sees her face in the water in various places. Originally, she suspects that the ghost is that of her next-door neighbor, murdered and carved up by her husband, but when Mary Fuer turns up alive and well, that idea is scotched. The truth turns out to be much darker …

Hitchcock’s influence is fairly obvious here, from the incident with the Fuers (Rear Window) to the emphasis on the shower bath (Psycho). But Hitchcock would not have disposed of the Fuers so early in the film; they would have played a significant, if unexpected, role later on. Hitchcock would not, I think, have introduced a genuine ghost; his movies, as I remember them, were always about people, and while the supernatural might have played a role, it would have been a spurious one. And Hitchcock, to the best of my memory, never ever depended on the startle factor to get audience reaction (that’s the one where the heroine always travels by walking backwards so that she can unexpectedly encounter a gripping hand on the edge of the screen and the audience can jump three feet out of their seats). This movie is full of startle factor; some of us spent so much time jumping that our seats were damaged. (On the other hand, the two underplayed scenes in the psychiatrist’s office struck me as pure Hitchcock, right down to the camera work — I’m not sure why.)

There are other elements that ring false. Most notable, to me, is Caitlin. At the very beginning of the film, she goes off to college, and we never, ever hear from her again (her mother, with whom she was reportedly very, very close, tries to phone her once, but she’s out, so that’s apparently the end of that relationship…). She should at least have called a couple of times to ask for more money.

An interesting film, and Harrison Ford looks considerably less of an antique here than he did in last year’s Random Hearts. (Which makes me happy, Ford being five days younger than I am …). But I don’t think it will be remembered as one of the great movies of this year.