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“Stir of Echoes” is a supernatural chicago neighborhood.” Kevin Bacon stars in one of his best performances as a telephone lineman named Tom Witzky, who plays in a band, and desperately wants to free himself from the monotony of his life – which he is very successful at achieving.
“I never wanted to be famous,” he tells his wife. “I just never expected to be so ordinary.” What he does not know, is that he has an extraordinary gift: he is a receiver, meaning he has the ability to see spirits. This gift manifests one uneventful and inebriated night during a beer party, when his sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) starts discussing hypnosis. Tom confidently states he cannot be hypnotized. Lisa attempts to do so, imagining an empty theater and guiding Tom into the direction of the screen. He goes deeper into a state of trance and eventually wakes up, horrified after having vision of violence and indistinct, unsettling events in his house.
The ghostly apparitions remain. They’re connected, possibly, to occurrences off the avenue, where the locals are raising families and buying and renovating older houses. Tom is stalked by nightmares at night, and his dream imagery of lovemaking is interrupted by visions of severed body parts, which they certainly will. He begins to take sick days, and his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) is concerned: Is he losing it? After the movies about demonic manifestations looming over Manhattan skyscrapers, it is refreshing to see bizarre things occur to people who frequent the corner bar, attend high school football games, and stroll to the local church. In a Manhattan movie his wife would have committed him to a psychiatrist. In this Chicago version she tells her sister ‘He’s exhausted all his sick days. They‘re going to start docking him.’ Only his son Jake (Zachary David Cope) comprehends.
Not long into the film, he questions a ghostly character, “Does it hurt to be dead?” As he reaches for his father’s hand, Jake says, “Don’t be afraid of it, daddy.” Tom saw Samantha, a ghostly figure he knew, sitting beside him on his living room sofa. Now, we discover, a mentally handicapped woman went missing in the area a few months ago. Jake’s sister watches him and somehow he seems to know the name Samantha.
Later on in the video, Samantha simply says, “dig.” So he digs. The first thing he digs is up the backyard. Soon, the cellar catches his interest. In the end, he has to bring a pneumatic drill. In this portion of the film, which is known as the weakest section, David Koepp, who was the writer and director, makes him dig more than th point necessitates. The movie is about ghosts, not digging, and for some reason, I was reminded of Steven Spielberg’s “Cloase Encounters of the Third Kind” where Richard Dreyfuss is given signals by aliens and ends up sculpting potatoes instead of Tatoos. In the master version, the needless potatoes were replaced, but Koepp should take similar action in the future.
At the same time, in another part of the world, Maggie meets a Chicago cop (Eddie Bo Smith Jr.) who is a Receiver, and in a scene that is fascinating in its concept, she happens onto a gathering of other people with superhuman sight. I would have appreciated more of that subplot which is underdeveloped, but who cares: Koepp’s screenplay does tie together the special effects wizardry with action among the neighbors which, thankfully, is more sorrowful and pathetic than sensationalistic.
Many times, he can recommend characters that have lost sanity within themselves. It is one of those instances where he implodes in a role, and that choice makes sense. Another actor might have reached too far. It isn’t just concern that Kathryn Erbe shows but also annoyance, which is a nice touch, and Illeana Douglas plays your average busybody sister in law who takes everything that interests you in your wife and goes overboard. (When prompted for suggestions after setting these things in motion, she unsympathetically tells me, “Find one of those roguishly handsome priests who can, in some way, usher you through this.”) Fred Murphy’s photography places these people in the modern world and there’s one breathtaking shot, it begins with the lineman up on the pole making a call and pulling back until we see the massive Chicago River with three L trains in view. There were no ghosts in sight, I know, but that certainly is a nice picture.
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