Taglines: In every mind there is a door that has never been opened.
Stir of Echoes movie storyline. A man is hypnotized at a party by his sister-in law. He soon has visions and dreams of a ghost of a girl. Trying to avoid this, nearly pushes him to brink of insanity as the ghost wants something from him – to find out how she died. The only way he can get his life back is finding out the truth behind her death. The more he digs, the more he lets her in, the shocking truth behind her death puts his whole family in danger.
Stir of Echoes is a 1999 American supernatural horror film released in the United States on September 10, 1999, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by David Koepp. The film is loosely based on the novel A Stir of Echoes by Richard Matheson.
On its opening weekend, the film ranked third in box office gross with $5,811,664, and stayed in the top ten for three weeks. After a 14-week run, its total domestic gross was $21,073,708.[2] In the UK, the film grossed £818,213. Worldwide, it made more than $23 million.
Film Review for Stir of Echoes
an it really be true that Kevin Bacon is just a couple of months shy of his 42nd birthday? This actor, who first came to our attention in Barry Levinson’s Diner 18 years ago, has maintained effectively the same faintly overlooked presence ever since: coiled, muscular, yet open and always youthful and verging on naivety, with an agreeable, intelligent identity that suggests an existence outside the world of acting.
The classic definition of a star is someone with something missing rather than something extra and maybe Bacon has never had it missing, or not enough of it missing. Although he has always been a plausible leading player, actual stardom has always eluded him. Playing comedy could be an option for him of course: and yet he could be too subtle for the very broad neo-Jerry-Lewis style now in fashion and even the famous “Six Degrees” game is a slight on his abilities and achievements. He’s not obscure enough for that to be interesting and you can play the six-removes game with anyone. (There used to be a similar game of being six handshakes away from Mao Zedong – you could win by getting within five handshakes of Edward Heath.)
So it is with something of a pang that Bacon’s fans will see him bestow his presence on Stir of Echoes: an efficient and entertaining ghost story updated from an old tale by Richard Matheson, who wrote the screenplay for The Incredible Shrinking Man and the novel on which Spielberg based Duel.
Bacon plays Tom, a blue-collar Chicago guy who works for the telephone company, married with a five-year-old boy, and idly dreaming of making it as a rock musician. His wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) sours his mood by telling him she is pregnant again, placing his music ambitions even further out of reach and it is at this point that grouchy Tom is riled by his sister-in-law Illeana Douglas: another classic supporting player, whose jolie-laide looks condemn her to best-friend roles and making the leading lady look good.
She says he is not open to new experiences, and in her New Agey way hypnotises him, causing the initially derisive Bacon to succumb utterly and undergo a terrifying sense of communicating with the dead. And this gives him something in common with his son Jake, who communicates with the great beyond also, whispering things like: “Does it hurt being dead?”
Naturally, Stir of Echoes has elements of a Sixth Sense knock-off, especially when Bacon goes all cold and his breath condenses. But thankfully, it is not encumbered with a twist ending, and avoids all the silliness that finally sank Sixth Sense.
And the moments in which a child is menaced by a dead person are enjoyably unpleasant, especially the scene in which little Jake is trying to watch HR Pufnstuf on TV but the ghost keeps changing the channel to the horror film that he’s not allowed to watch – which keeps playing even when the deeply bewildered Jake has actually pulled the plug out of the wall.
Bacon’s own contact with the dead works best when it manifests itself in little glimpses of horror and desecration: the dreamed moment when a fingernail – perhaps Bacon’s fingernail – is snapped off with a wince-inducing crack. And there is a clammy dream sequence in which Bacon visits the bathroom and seeing that one of his front teeth has gone completely rotten, colour of reddish mud, reaches into his mouth and after some effort pulls it out of his head together with a gout of blood. It is the most squeaming tooth scene since Richard Burton demonstrated John Hurt’s utter physical abasement in the adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 by pincering one of his teeth out with his finger and thumb.
Bacon himself endures all this sturdily, looking far younger than his years, and with his shirt off, his musculature has only slightly less definition than it did in Apollo 13, but still in good nick, and perfectly in line with the Abs Tyranny of modern Hollywood. Added to this is a distinctly serviceable script by director David Koepp, who allows Ileana Douglas to tell Maggie chirpily: “What you need is a young priest with smouldering good looks who can get you through all this!”
There is a workmanlike carpentry in Koepp’s script and direction which satisfactorily launches moments of scariness and does not allow the narrative tension to sag or, as in The Sixth Sense, pitch into potholes of inconsistency and dullness. And Bacon is always an A-list player whose style elevates anything he’s in. You can do a lot worse on a Friday night than this.
Stir of Echoes (1999)
Directed by: David Koepp
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Erbe, Illeana Douglas, Jennifer Morrison, Kevin Dunn, Zachary David Cope, Conor O’Farrell, Lusia Strus, Stephen Eugene Walker
Screenplay by: David Koepp
Production Design by: Nelson Coates
Cinematography by: Fred Murphy
Film Editing by: Jill Savitt
Costume Design by: Leesa Evans
Set Decoration by: Susie Goulder
Art Direction by: David W. Krummel
Music by: James Newton Howard
MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexuality and language.
Distributed by: Artisan Entertainment
Release Date: September 10, 1999
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