Stir of Echoes Review
by Scott Renshaw (renshaw AT inconnect DOT com)September 11th, 1999
STIR OF ECHOES
(Artisan)
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas, Zachary David Cope, Kevin Dunn, Jenny Morrison.
Screenplay: David Koepp, based on the novel _A Stir of Echoes_ by Richard Matheson.
Producers: Gavin Polone and Judy Hofflund.
Director: David Koepp.
MPAA Rating: R (profanity, sexual situations, violence, nudity, adult themes)
Running Time: 93 minutes.
Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
Yes, it's true -- STIR OF ECHOES features a child who sees dead people. It includes in its metaphysics the notion that disgruntled spirits cause chilly temperatures in the human world. It is at least partially a tale of a wrongful death made right. Depending on where you fall in the old glass half-full/half-empty argument, STIR OF ECHOES is the beneficiary of either extraordinarily good timing or extraordinarily bad timing. Maybe comparisons with mega-success THE SIXTH SENSE will doom it to obscurity. Or maybe a spillover effect, with movie-goers still hungry for supernatural subject matter, will present it with an audience it might not otherwise have had.
For my money, viewers can't go far wrong either way. If they go, they'll be moderately satisfied; if they don't go, they won't be missing all that much. It begins as a tale of a working class Chicago guy named Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) who dabbles in a garage band and generally feels his life hasn't amounted to all that much. That perception changes radically when his sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) hypnotizes him at a party, turning him into a receiver for weird psychic visions featuring a missing neighborhood teenager (Jenny Morrison). Tom also discovers that his 5-year-old son Jake (Zachary David Cope) is even more tuned into the netherworld, and that his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) is understandably freaked out by his odd behavior.
It's awfully easy to dwell on the similarities between STIR OF ECHOES and THE SIXTH SENSE, weighing in simply with whether the former is better or worse than the latter. It would be easier to ignore those similarities if the whole film didn't feel overly familiar. When a kindly black cop (Eddie Bo Smith Jr.) informs Maggie of Jake's visionary gifts, he suddenly turns into Scatman Crothers in THE SHINING; when Tom's obsessive behavior leads him to tear up the house and alienate his family, he's Richard Dreyfuss in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND. The Richard Matheson novel on which STIR OF ECHOES is based is forty years old, so no one can rightly accuse the film of thievery. That doesn't change the way STIR OF ECHOES is likely to be viewed today: a mish-mash of familiar elements.
That's not to say that STIR OF ECHOES isn't also a reasonably effective thriller in its own conventional way. David Koepp, who helmed the unsettling and little-seen TRIGGER EFFECT, has a knack for crafting a scene that gets under your skin without resorting to too many shock cuts. He also draws nice work from a solid cast, particularly Erbe adding a few shadings to the thankless wife role. Koepp's direction may get a little showy -- jittery time-lapse shots of ghosts, funky business in the "theater" of Tom's hypnotic trance -- but it does its job manufacturing the creeps. It ain't deep, but it's scary enough.
Unfortunately for STIR OF ECHOES, it's less effective than it could be because Koepp seems to think it _is_ deep. The subtext of Joe Six-Pack Tom seeing his new gift as a shot at finally doing something extraordinary comes and goes, and it's hard to see anything voluntary in his character arc. Bacon's performance suffers from this erratic motivation -- he's reasonably convincing both in his terror and in his determination, but the two never come together. By the time Koepp trots out an extended flashback of a crime in progress, his melodrama has bogged down the chills. Ironically, that's yet another way STIR OF ECHOES is like THE SIXTH SENSE: it's a moderately clever genre diversion that wants us to believe it's something more.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 stir crazies: 6.
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