Classic Movie Review: 'Stir of Echoes'

Stir of Echoes (1999)

Directed by David Koepp

Written by David Koepp

Starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Kevin Dunn, Illeana Douglas

Release Date September 10th 1999

Published August 21st, 2023

Stir of Echoes is such a great title. It's both esoteric and evocative. It creates a sense of history being brought swirling back to life but not fully. It's the perfect title for this movie about the echoes of the recent past resounding into to the present and leading into a terrifying and sad future unfolding before Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), their son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), and the tight knit neighborhood that welcomed this family with open arms.

Six months ago, just before Jake and Maggie moved into their new rented home in closely knit Chicago neighborhood, a young girl went missing. Her name is Samantha Kozac and she's been written off as a runaway by most. Samantha was mentally challenged and this has also been used as an excuse to dismiss her disappearance. Samantha is almost entirely unknown to Jake and Maggie even as they've been brought wholly into their new neighborhood home.

Jake is a failed musician supporting his family by working as a telephone lineman and bitterly lamenting his life. Maggie is far more content, loving her husband and raising their son Jake. For his part, Jake is a happy little boy who likes to indulge in talking to imaginary beings. At least, that's what it would seem from the outside. In reality, Jake has an innate ability to speak with the dead. Moreover, he's been speaking with Samantha Kozak, though his parents are not aware of this.

Meanwhile, Jake has a strained relationship with his wife's sister, Lisa (Illeana Douglas). Lisa is a free spirit who is not a fan of grumpy, bitter Jake and isn't afraid to say so. Lisa fancies herself as a hypnotist in training and when challenged about her new profession at a neighborhood party, her conflict with Jake comes to a head. Jake challenges Lisa to hypnotize him and after a little hemming and hawing, she agrees. Taking Jake deep into his own subconscious, Lisa plants a suggestion for Jake open up more and be more receptive to the world around him.

This leads to Jake starting to have visions of Samantha Kozak and for father and son to begin spending more and more time together talking about this missing girl, all while Maggie frets and Jake approaches losing his job for not going to work. Nightmares become clues, visions become realities, and a deep dark secret will be uncovered all while a deep sense of dread overwhelms every frame of Stir of Echoes. The outstanding production design is the perfect underline to the grim nature of what is slowly being uncovered.

Director David Koepp is one of the more unique directorial talents working today. Primarily a writer, Koepp's forays into directing tend to be weird, fascinating horror stories that become character studies. His Secret Window has become a minor cult classic for allowing Johnny Depp to indulge his hammy, actorly side and create a character full of tics and wild personality traits. Koepp allows Kevin Bacon some of the same leeway in Stir of Echoes and though Bacon doesn't go full on weird as Depp did, we do see something of Kevin Bacon that he'd not shown before, a brilliant dark side of his everyman persona that is completely awesome.

If you thought Bacon held the center of Footloose, wait until you see what he does with Stir of Echoes. This is a commanding performance, a bravura, powerhouse piece of underrated character work. Bacon is a bit of a mystery as an actor and that quality is a huge boon to Stir of Echoes as we peel away layers of this man amid an otherwise somewhat conventional ghost story. Bacon's brief descent into madness is riveting to watch as he becomes so single-minded and driven you think he might explode if he doesn't find some kind of satisfying resolution.

Stir of Echoes was mostly ignored at the time of its release. Part of that was a story that wasn't easy to market while maintaining no spoilers. But, perhaps, the bigger issue was being a child-talks-to-the-dead movie in the wake of the most popular and critically acclaimed child-talks-to-the-dead movie, The Sixth Sense. That film was released one month before Stir of Echoes and was still pulling in a crowd when Echoes opened. It's no wonder it was swamped by Shyamalan's classic. History however, provides endless opportunities for a movie to be reborn and my hope is that one day Stir of Echoes will emerge from the shadow of The Sixth Sense to stand on its own as a legit classic or at least a cult phenomenon.

Stir of Echoes is the classic on the latest edition of the Everyone is a Critic Movie Review Podcast. Myself and my co-hosts, film fan Bob Zerull, and artist Jeff Lassiter talk about all of the week's new movies, news, box office, and at least one classic film every week. We chose Stir of Echoes this week just because we all loved it and wanted to see it again. We will be talking about our appreciation of this underrated gem on this week's episode, available on Wednesday, August 23rd, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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