Stir of Echoes
Written and Directed by David Koepp
Kevin Bacon, Zachary David Cope, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas and Kevin Dunn (I)
playing at theaters accessible to everyone- ie - multiplexes, etc.
*  *  *    (three stars)
no time to read the whole review?
THE JIST of MY PROSE
Random, disquieting and bending the light rays to shine them from the otherworldly into our world - 'Stir of Echoes' is a really creepy treat - a horror film that's dark, sinister and just a few feet left of center. Now, if it didn't resolve itself so gosh-darn quickly. It cleans up the mess like a premature....well, you know.....too fast.

Watching someone get hypnotized and go mad is exciting, engaging and terrifying all at
the same time. This is the second film released this year that uses hypnotism as a pivotal
plot point (the first being the highly underrated and often biting 'Office Space'). In 'Stir of
Echoes', Tom Witzky (Bacon), a scruffy grump of a man, (whom the film will ask us to
pity later on), is put in a trance by his wife’s sister, Lisa (Douglas). When he comes out of
it, he is told that several things occurred, none of which he can remember. Feeling odd,
he and his wife (Erbe) go home for the night. As the days proceed, he begins to have
visions of places and things which he cannot recall. He hallucinates. Things start to tear
at him from the inside until finally he realizes that he is on an unnamed quest for who
knows what.

Luckily, Bacon plays the lead dead-on. He gives us an extremely sympathetic
transcendence of marble loss. Not felt in many of the horror films of late, this connection
we find in Tom is the glue that holds the film together. It’s a speedy movie and the
character is sufficiently authored to make the transformation intact and shoot us a
realistic glimpse that he might make it back. We connect with Bacon in a much different
way than the rest of the characters, so to we, who are compassionate towards Bacon, their
actions are strange and offending. This technique is a masterstroke, avoiding disposal of
Tom as a rowdy villain and leaving him a normal guy having a really bad acid trip.

 David Koepp is a really odd screenwriter. He is the king of reducing material to a
code that only stands in the multiplex ('Jurassic Park', 'Mission : Impossible' and 'Snake
Eyes', to name a few), but the films he directs never seem to cater to this type of writing.
If you’ll remember, Koepp made a film that came out three years ago called 'The Trigger
Effect', which was edgy and timely, but never a popcorn flick. Koepp seemed to be
starting on a different kind or road with that film. Here, he has a film almost as offbeat
and wired, but he cracks it in the third act, resolving it far too quickly and making sense
of the thrills too early. I was really into a story that was split right down the middle
between being a supernatural spookfest and a true-to-life neighborhood mystery. Koeep
pulls the blindfold off of the audience before we have a chance to sweat in fear of the
unknown we’re addicted to watching.

 How does the film hold up among the rest of the fright films that made their way
to our screens this year? It has much the same effect (intense exhilaration, awareness of
surroundings) as 'The Blair Witch Project'. It’s not nearly the Hitchcockian creation of
eerieness that 'The Sixth Sense' is, but it’s still full of the spirit of scary movies - making
us jump and piquing our interest with disturbing subject matter. It’s a tough film to live
with because it’s not perfect and needs to be to work properly. There are some really
wonderful random and expert dread tactics at work, though. On a Saturday night -
it passed for both the intellectual film and the social throwaway.
 
 
 
 

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