#Stir of echoes online movie

When Tom and Maggie confront her, Debbie angrily questions them about her sister Samantha, explaining that she had an intellectual disability, with the mental capacity of an eight-year-old and thus a child's tendency to trust strangers.

Tom then sees strange flashes of red light that eventually leads him to the Metra station where Debbie is speaking with her mother about Jake. Meanwhile, Tom senses Jake is in danger and rushes home but finds him gone.

Debbie gets upset and snatches Jake, running off with him in the night. While Tom and Maggie attend a high-school football game, Jake is overheard by his babysitter, Debbie, as he speaks with Samantha. Tom then begins experiencing visions of a violent scuffle involving a girl who he later learns is Samantha Kozac, a 17-year-old that disappeared from the neighborhood six months prior. After putting him under, Lisa plants a post-hypnotic suggestion in Tom urging him to 'be more open-minded'.

At a party one evening, Tom challenges Maggie's sister, Lisa, who is a believer in paranormal activity, to hypnotize him.

#Stir of echoes online movie

The title sounds slightly pretentious, but a stir of echoes is exactly what the movie delivers.Tom Witzky is a phone lineman living in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago with his pregnant wife Maggie and his son Jake, who possesses the ability to commune with the dead. There are neat camera tricks - the spook moves at a slightly different film speed to the living - and a couple of great bad dream moments, but the real skill Koepp shows is that he grounds the scary stuff in a believable reality and delivers a ghost story that doesn't lose its grip after the spirits have unambiguously been made manifest. Here, he does a neat job of adapting and updating Matheson's novel, and demonstrates a real flair with actors - the always-undervalued Bacon is on top form as an ordinary man on the point of cracking up, while Erbe is one of the best housewife heroines in recent memory. The spectre impinging on their lives is a flitting girl, missing sister of the Witzkys' hysterical babysitter, and Tom becomes obsessed with the belief she is buried somewhere nearby.Īs Tom gets into Close Encounters-style destruction of his garden and house in search of the corpse, his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) learns to be afraid not only of the ghosts who appear to her husband and son, but of human menaces who would rather a crime was buried and forgotten.ĭavid Koepp, an A-list screenwriter ( Jurassic Park, Carlito's Way), made a small directorial debut with The Trigger Effect, also about a homey neighbourhood made monstrous. When she has him under, she suggests he should be 'a little more open-minded', and he wakes to discover that this is literally true - his mind is open to messages from the dead with whom his Sixth Sense-style son Jake (Zachary David Cope) has always been in tune. In an everyday Chicago neighbourhood, the supernatural creeps in at a party as telephone lineman Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) challenges his New Age-y sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) to demonstrate her hypnotic power on him.

Overshadowed at the American box office by The Sixth Sense, which spins off from a similar premise, this quietly creepy adaptation of a Richard Matheson novel ( I Am Legend, What Dreams May Come, The Incredible Shrinking Man) has taken its time to arrive here, and may well score better without blockbuster competition.