Stir of Echoes Review
by Stephen Graham Jones (lisgj AT LIB DOT TTU DOT EDU)October 5th, 1999
Take Chinatown as the archetypical detective movie. In it a private investigator has to reconstruct some crime bit by bit. And the crime of course happened before the movie started. And everyone tries to steer him off the case. And it all gets real personal real fast, to the point where the detective's need to know is held in balance against his need to live. These conventional developments we expect from a hard-boiled detective movie. What we don't expect them from so much, though, is horror, which is part of the appeal of director David Koepp's Stir of Echoes (based on Richard Matheson's book)--that, although it has dead people walking the halls, is nevertheless structured after the traditional detective movie, even down to the opening, where Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon)--private-investigator-like--is minding his own business, just trying to scratch out a decent living, when a 'strange woman' enters and turns his world inside-out.
Or, specifically, via an overextended Big Lebowski-ish hypnosis session, she accidentally flips a switch in his psyche, which transforms him into a 'receiver,' which translates into the ability to see dead people walking around, to catch glimpses of the past, the future, all that. But of course Witzky never quite sees it all in detail (qua Blink), which is tantalizing enough to compel him to reconstruct bit by bit whatever 'crime' occurred before the movie opened. Think Poltergeist; it's the same story with a tighter cast and better music (or, it's 1996's Spectre with good direction). And his 'investigation' unfolds conventionally, with all the appropriate setbacks, distractions, isolations, etc. He even gets some help from his son (Zachary David Cope), who's a 'natural' receiver, not unlike Haley Joel Osment from Sixth Sense, though Zachary David Cope is no Haley Joel Osment. Where Stir of Echoes breaks from the traditional detective movie set-up is that the 'detective' here actually has a home life--nominally pregnant wife and prescient son--which serves to heighten what's at stake for him here. And it is effective in that regard, though at times the rounds of marital conflict and reconciliation seem a bit forced, more dramatically necessary than developmentally. This home-life, however, does give Witzky room to complain that his life is too 'ordinary,' which, in a horror-movie, is another way of asking for it. Soon enough everything's all but ordinary, and Witzky only wants to close the Doors of Perception which Jim Morrison wanted open so badly in The Doors.
And it's easy to understand why he wants them closed: the undead he can see now are easily the summer's scariest, even moreso than Sixth Sense's, this due largely to how Koepp renders undead movement--both fast and contained, as in Jakob's Ladder, which is for some reason primally disturbing. Which is of course exactly what we pay for--to be scared. In that sense, Stir of Echoes satisfies, and then some. However. For a while, when the external pressure Witzky's facing is at low ebb, Stir of Echoes tries to maintain the tension via the undead doing all the typical haunting things--turning out lights, standing around every corner, etc, which doesn't fit with how the undead in the reality of Stir of Echoes are 'supposed' to act. But oh well. It happens in Romero too, whom Koepp unsubtly references. Aside from that, and in spite of an ill-advised (see: non-catchy) title, Stir of Echoes is high-caliber horror, the kind that stays with you a little longer than you really want it to.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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