Can You Dig It?
Stir Of Echoes (15)
On general release. Written and directed by David Koepp. Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas
At last I have it! - death is the new sex. While movies were still black-and-white, sex was off-limits enough to be a testing subject. Until very recently, it was obligatory, until the new Puritanism (or ennui) chased it away again. The effect of romance is somewhat dulled by the divorce statistics. Democratic death, who visits us all in time, is very much the forbidden phrase of our time.
This up and coming genre 'the dead are always with us' is something of a bind. Death isn't all that hot, and should be avoided, but when it does catch up with you, life goes on. As it were. Party invitations may dry up, but you don't have to go to work.
The clear forerunner of Stir of Echoes is The Sixth Sense, but there are others - Ghost, Dead Again, and even Beetlejuice. Stir of Echoes is the poorer cousin. It's more confused, the story looks like two disparate halves welded together - a supernatural chiller, with quite effective shocks, and a peacetime thriller, about the 'nice neighbourhood' that houses monsters. Kevin Bacon and Kathryn Erbe work well together as Tom and Maggie, while they have regular marital strife, but the shift into hysteria, is out of their range, and writer/director Koepp hasn't given them the right pointers.
Jake, their son, starts the movie talking to an imaginary friend, but neither of his parents take any notice of his odd behaviour. The imaginary friend is, apparently, dead, but not scary to Jake As the kid doesn't get the creeps, it's a little puzzling why his dad does. Tom's mind is 'opened' by a wild post-hypnotic suggestion at a party, after which he gains very limited supernatural powers. He sees some things, but not others. He can track his baby as if Jake was fitted with one of those car tracer bugs. He knows his mother-in-law is dead before the phone rings. If he could see just a little more, the film would be an hour shorter, but that's not a convincing reason for his psychic circuits to go on the blink.
The ghost Jake sees, is similarly confusing. She passes her time in the afterlife chatting to the kid, rather than prying on the neighbours after lights out, and scaring Tom who sees her, and Maggie, who doesn't. Maybe she can time-travel, and mess with Tom's teeth, and she still can't check who's downstairs. Films like this should have rules, or a good reason not to have them. Beetlejuice just went to whatever was funny, but Stir of Echoes tries to go to wherever is scary, and is much less effective.
Koepp handles the sudden bangs which raise the tension quite well, but never goes beyond cliché. Like The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes uses visible breath as a visual indicator of a temperature drop. In the earlier film, it was a hint, here it's a prod. Tom sets about digging up his rented house believing that he's been 'told' to. This is the obsessive scene we've had in Close Encounters, and slightly differently, in The Shining. He goes so overboard, it could have been played for laughs. Bacon doesn't raise the pitch of his mania, so it becomes an excuse to show off his torso. Which lasts rather a while.
In the time it takes to walk to the exit, Stir of Echoes unravels completely. Maybe it should have been given to David Lynch who handles the nasty beneath the ordinary much better. Maybe Maggie's pregnancy is some sort of homage to Eraserhead, it does fill any other purpose.
Stir of Echoes is a disappointment all round. The pace is too flaccid, the dialogue is good in parts, and stupid in others. None of the performances go the extra mile beyond competent. And what was that ending? Maybe the budget ran out. You can however, get away with an awful lot with a killer final scene. Stir of Echoes doesn't have it.
