Lifetime Movie Meets Syfy Channel Meets Wet Cryptid
What Lies Below is the answer to a question no one asked:
“What if The Shape of Water was remade as a horny, poorly written Lifetime thriller, and then someone remembered at the last minute it was supposed to be horror?”
Written and directed by Braden R. Duemmler, this is a movie about a girl, her mom, and Mom’s deeply suspiciously attractive aquatic geneticist boyfriend who looks like he was grown in a lab marked “Abercrombie & Fish.” It desperately wants to be an eerie, slow-burn sci-fi chiller about female adolescence, predation, and the unknown. Instead, it’s 90 minutes of red flags, creepy staring, and an ending that feels like the world’s weirdest aquarium screensaver.
Meet the Wells Women and Mr. Red Flag
Our protagonist is Liberty “Libby” Wells, a 16-year-old girl who returns from summer camp to find:
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Her mom, Michelle, has a new boyfriend.
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Said boyfriend is a chiseled, shirt-averse “aquatic geneticist” named John Smith (subtle), who talks like a motivational TED Talk for plankton.
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They’re all going to be bonding at the family lake house, which is basically a “Bad Decisions” timeshare.
On paper, this could be fun: teen girl navigating puberty, jealousy, and suspicion while Mom acts like she pulled a hot professor out of a dating app. In practice, Libby’s entire character is “awkward and uncomfortable,” Michelle’s is “thirsty and naïve,” and John’s is “what if a red flag learned to walk?”
Within, like, ten minutes, John:
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Gifts Libby a bracelet with weird fertility symbols on it (already no).
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Stares at her a little too long.
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Is caught standing in her bedroom doorway at night while she pretends to be asleep.
In any sane universe, the movie ends right there with Libby calling literally anyone and saying, “Hey, can someone come remove the eel in a Henley from my house?” Instead, we push forward, because apparently we needed more evidence that this man is a walking HR violation.
The Creep Factor: Accidental or…?
For a film supposedly about horror, What Lies Below spends an impressive amount of time just being profoundly uncomfortable in a non-supernatural way.
Highlights from the “Please Arrest This Man” reel:
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Libby gets her period; John sees the blood, kneels down, and starts blotting it up like he’s polishing a sacrificial altar, all while giving her a Very Intense Look.
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He sneaks into the bathroom while she’s showering and literally sniffs her through the curtain.
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He grabs her genitals (offscreen, but described), and the film treats it as a plot device instead of the main event.
The problem isn’t that these scenes exist—using predatory behavior as horror fuel can be powerful if handled thoughtfully. The problem is that the movie doesn’t know what to do with them beyond, “Wow, that sure was creepy, anyway, what if he were also a fish alien?”
Libby tries to tell Michelle what’s going on, and Michelle basically responds with, “You’re jealous, and I’m in love, also I’m 35—okay 42—but regardless: let me gaslight you real quick.” It’s less a nuanced mother-daughter conflict and more a script shouting, “No one will believe you!” because it saw that in other thrillers and wrote it down.
Science, But Make It Vaguely Gooey
John is introduced as an “aquatic geneticist” working with parasites to help organisms adapt to changing environments. Which is science-speak for “I do things in lakes that probably violate international treaties.”
We’re told he’s studying parasites, environmental shifts, and fertility symbols, but the film never really bothers to make his work coherent. It’s all vibes:
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Glowing red light in the lake at night.
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Vials of mysterious substances.
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Parasites chewing on stuff in tanks.
It’s like someone googled “water + science + ominous” and dumped the results into the script. The scientific logic is so flimsy it might as well be holding a “Do Not Question” sign.
When Libby sees John walking into the lake at night, glowing red water around him, and then reappearing onshore completely dry claiming “sleepwalking,” she does what any protagonist in a bad horror film does: she is suspicious, but not suspicious enough to leave.
The Basement: Where the Plot Hopes You’re Too Tired to Care
The final third of the movie is where it takes a hard left turn from “sleazy fish boyfriend thriller” into “sci-fi cult fever dream,” and not in a good way.
Libby discovers:
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Symbols carved into her wrist where the bracelet used to be.
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Michelle trapped in a weird sci-fi tank on IV, with matching symbols and a vibe that screams “alien breeding program.”
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Michelle giving birth to a dying creature while John watches like a proud lab dad.
Then it just escalates from “gross” to “what are we even doing anymore” very quickly:
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Marley, Libby’s friend, shows up, only to die offscreen and be eaten by parasites in a water tank.
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Libby tries to escape, gets attacked by John, and wakes up tied up in the basement.
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Multiple identical “Johns” appear, peeling back walls to reveal rows of unconscious women in water tanks like a very damp, illegal fertility clinic.
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John vomits a glowing substance into Libby’s mouth (romantic!) and forces her to swallow it.
At this point, the film stops pretending to care about characterization or logic and just dives face-first into weirdness. That could be great—if it felt earned. Instead, it feels like the story got bored of itself and decided, “Screw it, he’s a fish alien breeding humans for his species. Roll with it.”
That Ending, Though
The final image is clearly meant to be haunting:
Libby wakes up underwater, inside a tank, one of many women seemingly in pupal stasis. Water fills the chamber. She panics, bangs on the glass… and then suddenly calms down when she realizes she can breathe underwater. She smiles. Cut to black.
In a better movie, this could be devastating: the final surrender, the loss of humanity, the twisted coming-of-age metaphor where Libby literally transforms into something new and inhuman. Here, it feels like the film just shrugged and went, “Mermaid, I guess?”
Also, it’s hard to get emotionally wrecked when we barely know Libby as a person beyond “awkward, victimized, and into archaeology.” Her “transformation” doesn’t feel like the culmination of a character arc; it feels like an aesthetic choice.
The film ends not with a bang, but with a gurgle.
Wasted Potential and Wet Red Flags
The real tragedy of What Lies Below is that there is a good movie lurking under the surface algae. The pieces are there:
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Teen girl coming of age in a world of predatory men.
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A mom desperate for love ignoring danger signs.
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A slick, too-perfect outsider who turns out to be literally inhuman.
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Environmental anxiety, body horror, femininity, water symbolism.
You could absolutely build a smart, unsettling horror story out of that. But this script never commits to a theme long enough to build anything meaningful.
Is it about:
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Predatory grooming?
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Mother-daughter fracture?
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Environmental adaptation?
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Alien reproduction?
Yes. Kind of. All of the above. And yet, somehow, none of them in a satisfying way.
The movie flirts with interesting ideas but keeps choosing the trashy option without going full camp. If you’re going to make Mom’s boyfriend a glowing-eyed, membrane-blinking fish alien who smells period blood in the shower, either lean into the exploitation or back it up with razor-sharp metaphor. What Lies Below does neither; it floats limp in the middle.
Final Verdict: Throw It Back
What Lies Below isn’t the worst horror movie you’ll ever see. It’s competently shot, the performances are serviceable, and it’s watchable in that “background Netflix choice while you scroll your phone” way. But it’s also frustrating as hell, because it keeps hinting at depth and then belly-flopping into nonsense.
It wants to disturb you, but most of the time it just makes you want to file several police reports and then demand better writing. By the time Libby is smiling underwater as a newly minted fish-hybrid broodmare, you’re less horrified than you are mildly annoyed you sat through this instead of rewatching literally any other aquatic horror.
If you’re morbidly curious, sure, give it a shot. Just don’t blame me when you start side-eyeing every lake, bracelet, and unusually handsome geneticist you meet. The real lesson here? If Mom’s new boyfriend is too perfect, blinking sideways, and talks a lot about fertility symbols… tell her to swipe left and get a cat instead.
