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Small child can see dead people. Mother doesn't understand
what is going on. It is inevitable that Stir of Echoes will
be compared to The Sixth Sense. While not as clever or original
as The Sixth Sense (and with quite a different storyline), I
found this film to have a pretty creepy atmosphere that reminded
me of the scary movies on TV that I used to stay up by myself
to watch on Sunday nights as a kid.
Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) lives in a working class South Chicago
neighbourhood with his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and small
son Jake (Zachary David Cope). Tom is Mr Average, a guy who
had dreams of big things but never really got around to doing
them, and is now stuck as telecoms lineman who occasionally
potters around with his guitar. One night, Tom and Maggie go
to a local party (employing the highly dubious babysitting method
of taking the other half of the baby monitor walkie talkie to
the party with them) where Tom is enouraged to be hypnotised
by Maggie's spiritually enlightened sister Lisa (Illeana Douglas).
Despite Lisa's questionable hypnotic talents, she manages to
get Tom to do the normal hypnosis party tricks much to the amusement
of his friends. She also somehow unlock something else in Tom's
brain because from that night on he is haunted by unexplained
visions, mostly involving a dead girl.
Events in the Witzky household start to get more progressively
more bizarre from then on. Young Jake seems to talk to people
who aren't there. He gets kidnapped by his babysitter (maybe
the baby montitor tactic isn't so bad after all). One of the
neighbourhood teenagers shoots himself. Tom starts cracking
up under the strain of the chilling visions he is seeing. Poor
old Maggie doesn't understand anything that is going on and
just thinks that her family has gone loopy on her (although
I must say that she puts up with all of this nonsense remarkably
patiently!) Somehow, someone has to get to the bottom of these
creepy goings on and sort out a way to get things back to normal.
What I liked about this movie was the chilling atmosphere that
was maintained throughout. The plot itself was mostly fairly
predictable (with some clever moments such as Jake's fear of
the 'feathers') but that didn't stop the experience from being
spooky. This was achieved through judicious choice of music,
bleak setting, and some nifty camera tricks (such as the ghosts
moving at different speeds to living people). This is the sort
of movie that would have freaked me out as a kid because the
supernatural things were happening to ordinary people in an
ordinary neighbourhood. If it could happen to them it could
happen to me!
The acting is mostly adequate. Kevin Bacon was just right as
the good family man who goes a bit nutty but not in a Jack Nicholson
kind of way and Zachary David Cope did a good job as the innocent
little son, but I thought that some of the rest of the supporting
cast were a little flaky. But for me, this was solid B horror
and we all know that the B horrors are not noted for their brilliant
acting.
A good old ghost story. Much spookier than The Haunting.
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