Review: Stir of Echoes

Director/Writer: David Koepp (Based on the novel by Richard Matheson}
Cast: Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas, Zachary David Cope, Kevin Dunn, Jenny Morrison, Liza Weil, Conor O'Farrell, Kevin Dunn

Tom (Bacon) and Maggie (Erbe) Witzky and their five-year-old son, Jake (Cope), live in a quiet, friendly, blue-collar neighborhood in Chicago. Tom has dreams of being a musician, but Maggie's unexpected pregnancy shatters those dreams. Tom is disappointed, although he assures Maggie it isn't all that important.

"I didn't want to be famous," he says. "I just didn't expect to be so ordinary. "

That complaint becomes ironic after his sister-in-law, Lisa (Douglas), hypnotizes him on a dare. While he's entranced, he sees a series of violent images that pass too quickly for interpretation. They come again later that night, interrupting a lovemaking session. Then, Tom sees a young woman sitting next to him on the living room couch, pleading for something. Unfortunately, her words are garbled, and he can't understand what she's saying before she disappears.

As it happens, Tom isn't the only one seeing and hearing things. Jake has been having regular conversations with someone he calls Samantha (Morrison), and when he mentions that name to his baby sitter, Debbie Kozak (Weil), she goes berserk. Her older sister Samantha disappeared six months earlier, and now she's convinced the Witzky's know something about it.

As the week progresses, Tom receives more images and visions. He becomes so obsessed by them that he begins to alienate both Maggie and Jake. He is convinced there is a dark secret in his "nice neighborhood," and he won't rest until he finds out what it is.

Writer/director David Koepp (Jurassic Park) has updated Richard Matheson's 1958 novel of ghostly visitations and secret sins and done an admirable job of it. He has, at least, kept the main themes and the premise -- something not all such adaptations managed to do. We still have a seemingly ordinary neighborhood where ugly secrets hide beneath an everyday surface and an ordinary man who becomes extraordinary because of something beyond his control.

Stir of Echoes does what a good ghost story should do: it keeps the audience biting its collective fingernails wondering what's going to happen next. For those who with tricky digestive systems, there's a minimal amount of gore. It's your head Koepp wants to play with, not your stomach.

Production values are also excellent. Most of the action takes place indoors, the tiny rooms of the row house providing a claustrophobic reflection of the sense of entrapment Tom feels as his unwanted "gift" turns his life into chaos. Exteriors are dark, crowded and/or stormy, again more than adequately reflecting what is happening to these plain, ordinary people. Tom is trapped by both the desperate ghost and by his own desire to be something more than what he is, and the sets and location enhance our understanding of that fact.

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