Classic Movie Review : Stir of Echoes (1999)
I was born in the middle of nowhere and lived the first half of my life over there. The one thing I hated more than the place itself was how other people loved it. Nothing interesting ever happened and it could go on that way forever, they would’ve died happy knowing their existence had been fucking meaningless. You know how they say memorable art appeals to you for personal reasons? This is exactly why I loved David Koepp’s Stir of Echoes then.
Twenty years after it was released, my hatred of uppity neighborhoods and people who are too much into their neighborhood is also why I still love Stir of Echoes today.
Based on a Richard Matheson novel, Stir of Echoes tells the story of Tom Witzky (the immortal Kevin Bacon), a middle-aged phone lineman growing bitter with the mundane pressures of adulthood. One night, Tom accepts being hypnotized by his sister-in-law (Illeana Douglas) at a party. His life become immediately less mundane because he starts having violent, disruptive visions. Tom quickly realizes that someone who’s been killed is trying to tell him something.
Stir of Echoes is a movie about normalcy. Weirdo, conformist normalcy of people who obviously (and literally) have skeletons in their closets. Tom says it himself at the beginning of the movie. He apologizes to his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) for being ordinary. To be fair, his life is pretty mundane. He works, gets drunk with his neighbors on weekends, attends his local high school football team’s home game and quietly tries to raise his creepy son.
The one thing that makes Tom more interesting than his automaton neighbors is that he’s a musician and he somehow hasn’t completely given up on making it.
Turns out his neighbors have a good reason for surrendering their selves to the comfort of group activities. Tom’s neighborhood was shaken by a drama he was previously unaware of and everyone seems more interested in lulling themselves back to normalcy than to confront the inherent horror of young Samantha (Jennifer Morrison)’s disappearance. They leave Tom with the burden of awful visions and solving a murder he has jack shit to do with.
Now, Stir of Echoes is a solid supernatural thriller but it’s more than that. It’s a movie that antagonizes a certain form of normalcy. The kind of overbearing predictability that shelter people from their anxieties and end up swallowing their entire personalities. It’s a movie where ordinary people are using their ordinariness to conceal their mediocrity and a weirdo comes in to save the day (so to speak). No wonder why Kevin Bacon kicks so much ass in it.
Is Stir of Echoes the killer punch it was in 1999? Maybe not. I’ve seen atrociously spooky shit since and it clearly belongs to another era with its rudimentary special effects. They give it a campy charm, but don’t quite recapture the raw terror it caused when it originally came out. A movie with such strong themes like this will always age rather gracefully and remain extremely watchable, though. Stir of Echoes will still hit you where it hurts. Bonus points if you’re a marginal.
7.9/10
