Stir of Echoes
I really wish I thought more highly of David Koepp’s “Stir of Echoes.” This adaptation of a Richard Matheson story, with a compelling performance by Kevin Bacon, has fantastic elements to be a great little ghost story along the lines of “The Sixth Sense,” which had come out a month prior. The film, however, hits on the drum of “Kevin Bacon losing his mind” too early, and doesn’t let up until the conclusion, and Koepp is not a deft enough director to make that interesting or sustainable. He does have some interesting visual ideas he seizes upon along the way, however.
Bacon stars as Tom Witzky, a phone line repairman who lives in a rented house with his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and their young son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), in a blue-collar area of Chicago. Jake has been acting a bit funny, talking to himself, and it’s something Tom does not really concern himself with until, one night, they are at a block party with some neighbors, and the skeptic Tom asks his sister-in-law, Lisa (Illeana Douglas), to hypnotize him. From then on out, something is not right with Tom, and Jake’s behavior starts to raises questions for him, whether they are aligned with visions he has, and what they might have to do with Samantha, a young woman who went missing six months ago, and was the sister of a girl they get to babysit Jake as they go to a high school football game. As the pieces start to fall in to place, however, Tom’s hold on reality falls apart, and he becomes more unbalanced as he tries to get at the truth of what he’s seeing.
It feels as though Hollywood has forgotten about what a great presence Kevin Bacon can be for a film, and “Stir of Echoes” is a wonderful reminder of that. He’s capable of being a charismatic dick, and a sympathetic, but flawed, hero, and his role here gives us a glimpse of both of those qualities as Tom descends into madness. The scene where he convinces Lisa to hypnotize him is an excellent example of the first part of that equation, and the moments right after he’s pulled back out of it give him a chance to be at his most vulnerable, and point the way forward for the rest of the movie. The biggest problem is there isn’t a lot of room for him to maneuver once he gets to the madness. There is no let up, and while Bacon plays it as well as he can, that pitch is difficult to sustain for even this film’s modest 99 minutes. Koepp’s visual language for the film does not help with that. Although he and cinematographer Fred Murphy come up with fascinating images for the hypnotism scenes, as well as the hallucinations that come up after his initial hypnotism, the film’s unrelentingly dark visually, and it makes it hard to remain engaged by the film as it progresses. As it reveals all of its narrative secrets, it gets back some of its energy, but by then it’s so dour an experience that it’s tough to be engaged in what’s being revealed, and I remembered why I was so disappointed in “Stir of Echoes” in the first place.
