Runtime:
99 minutes
Release
Date: September 10, 1999
Rating:
R
Director:
David Koepp
Tom is a
working class guy living in a rental home with his son and wife,
Maggie. His sister-in-law Lisa is constantly talking down to him and
acting like he's a terrible guy, which just gets worse when Maggie
announces that she's pregnant. At a party, Lisa decides to hypnotize
him. When he comes out of it, the guests all have a good laugh at his
expense but his life is changed forever.
After
that night, he finds himself seeing things that aren't there. He even
has a vision of his neighbor's son killing his whole family and then
killing himself. Many of his visions involve a young woman with
glasses. After asking around, he learns that she was a mentally
challenged girl who lived in the neighborhood and went missing one
night. Jake, his son, also sees the same girl and says her name is
Sam.
One
night, Tom and Maggie go to a football game with their friends and
hire a new babysitter. They never used Debbie before, but Jake
suggested her after talking to Samantha. Tom starts seeing strange
things that night and quickly runs back home to find Jake gone. They
learn that Debbie is actually Samantha's sister and after hearing
that Jake talks to Sam and saw her in the house, she raced him to her
mother. Tom quickly finds himself caught up in the mystery of what
happened to Samantha and whether his neighbors and friends had
anything to do with her disappearance.
When I
was in college, my best friend/roommate and I were far from partiers.
We would rather spend the night playing board games, watching Buffy,
or hanging out in our room than hitting up a kegger. That led to use
watching a lot of movies and going to the movie theater a lot. We
probably saw Stir of Echoes six times in the theater, making it
second only to Final Destination in terms of the films we saw in the
theater. When Netflix recently added it, I was worried that I
wouldn't like it as much as I did before. Thankfully my worries were
wrong.
Stir of
Echoes reminds us of the talents of some actors we forgot about in
the past. I can't remember that last time Kevin Bacon starred in a
hit film, but he does a really great job here. You really do believe
that he's a man slowly losing his mind and you believe that he really
does care about the fate of poor Samantha. Zachary David Cope also
does a great job as Jake, which makes me wonder why he stopped
acting. Credit also has to go to Kathryn Erbe – who many know from
Law & Order: Criminal Intent – as Maggie and Illeana Douglas as
Lisa. I'm pretty sure she hasn't been in anything I didn't like.
One
minor issue is that the director starts throwing too many hints at us
towards the end, which makes it easy to figure out what really did
happen. I'm also not a big fan of the actual ending, mainly because I
think seeing a dead girl wander off with a smile on her face is pure
cheese. It does have some great jump scenes that I completely forgot
about, and those scenes actually did have me jumping out of my seat.
Stir of
Echoes is probably just as good if not better than you remember, and
you'll definitely like it poor than the weak sequel that followed.
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