Stir of Echoes is a great ghost story mystery that came out at absolutely the worst possible time...a month after The Sixth Sense was released. Aside from some surface similarities, the two movies couldn't be more different. Thankfully, Stir of Echoes went on to find a healthy life on home video and cable, where most people discovered it.
Tom (played by Kevin Bacon) lives a quiet life in their rented townhome with his wife Maggie (played by Kathryn Erbe) and young son Jake (played by Zachary David Cope). While at a party one evening, Tom agrees to be hypnotized by Maggie's older sister Lisa (played by Illeana Douglas) to prove it isn't real. Not only is he successfully hypnotized but when he comes out of it he finds himself having visions of the ghost of a young woman, Samantha (played by Jennifer Morrison), who went missing from the neighborhood many years back. As the visions intensify, Tom becomes increasingly obsessed with finding out what happened to Jennifer as well as what is happening to himself and these new found psychic powers that have been unlocked, risking his family, his job and ultimately his life in the process.
David Koepp adapted the film from the novel from Richard Matheson. Now, I've never read the original novel the film was based on but I've always felt the film was a rather unique and intriguing ghost story. At it's core, it has a real relatable blue collar sensibility to its characters. Because of this, it makes the story more engrossing and pulled me into it's narrative. Koepp, along with his actors do a nice job of grounding the story and makes the more fantastical elements work because of it. He also does a good job of slowly revealing the mystery central to the story. What does the ghost want from Tom and what happened to her? I have to say I genuinely did not see the ending coming from the film and that's a positive to how well the film was written and directed.
Kevin Bacon is front and center in this movie and gives a fantastic performance as Tom. He really does a great job capturing the character as an ordinary man caught in some pretty extraordinary circumstances whose life slowly begins to unravel the more he digs into Samantha's disappearance and death. Kathryn Erbe does well as his wife, Maggie, who is trying her best to help Tom in his recently developed troubles the best she can, even as things start getting decidedly creepy and strange. I appreciated that while she functioned as the voice of reason in the relationship, she at least believed what her husband was telling her was true and tried to be supportive. Illeana Douglas has a fun supporting role as the one who gets Tom into this mess in the beginning by unwittingly unlocking his psychic abilities by asking him to be more open minded while she had him under hypnosis. She plays the comic relief of sorts in the film, but does a good job of it and adds a unique element to the film.
Overall, I feel like over the years this film has grown and found it's audience. It was unfairly overlooked when it was released back in 1999. It's one I've always enjoyed and had still really like revisiting it all these years later for this review. It's certainly one of the more unique and intriguing ghost story films I've seen.
No comments:
Post a Comment