Stir of Echoes is a supernatural horror / thriller released in the United States in 1999, starring Kevin Bacon and directed by David Koepp. The film is loosely based on the novel of the same name by Richard Matheson.
Plot
Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) is a typical working-class man living in Chicago with his wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) and son Jake (Zachary David Cope).
One night at a party, Tom gets into a lively discussion with Maggie's sister Lisa (Illeana Douglas), who believes in psychic communication and the power of hypnosis. He challenges Lisa to hypnotize him, and after putting him under, Lisa plants a post-hypnotic suggestion in Tom urging him to "be more open-minded."
The results are not quite what anyone expected; that night, Tom sees the spirit of a pale young woman, Samantha (Jennifer Morrison), and panics. Maggie eventually learns that Tom is a "receiver," a person capable of communicating with the spirit world. Jake, like his father, is also a receiver, but while Jake is calm and coherent in his conversations with Samantha, Tom is confused and agitated, lacking the ability to control his power.
While Tom and his wife are headed to a football game one night, Jake is overheard talking to "Samantha" by the babysitter. She seems unusually upset at the prospect and then grabs Jake from the bed and runs off with him. Still waiting in line to get in the building, Tom is unnerved and suddenly rushes home only to find Jake gone. He runs out of the house and experiences flashes of red that lead him and his wife to a train station where the babysitter is talking to a cashier. After a confrontation at the train station, we discover that the babysitter is Samantha's sister, and the cashier at the train station is her mother.
Samantha Kozac, it turns out, was mentally handicapped; although a physically fully-developed teenager, she had the mental capacity of a child about eight years old, thus the tendency to trust strangers. She went missing months earlier.
Tom becomes obsessed with trying to figure out why he is seeing Samantha and what she wants from him, and even goes so far as to try and recreate their first meeting. He asks about Samantha, who used to live in the area, hoping someone could give him a clue. This attracts the attention of two teenagers, Kurt (Steve Rifkin) and Adam (Chalon Williams), and their fathers, who are friends of Tom's.
Later that day Tom has a psychic vision of Adam's father, Frank (Kevin Dunn), telling him "they" are going to kill him and Maggie. In the vision he walks to Frank's house and sees Adam with a gun to his chest. Tom wakes up and finds the same note Maggie left in his vision. He does not see Frank but decides to walk to Frank's nearby house anyway. Upon arriving, he hears a gunshot and finds Adam on the floor bleeding from a gunshot wound to his chest. He calls for help and ends up saving the boy's life.
Meanwhile Tom's wife Maggie runs into a mysterious man in a graveyard while taking a walk with Jake. He asks her to tell her husband to come meet with him and says goodbye to Jake who never told him his name. Jake then says goodbye to the man, calling him Neil, who also never said his name. Instead of asking Tom to go, Maggie takes it upon herself to go ask Neil what is going on with her husband. After some initial reluctance he tells her that sometimes trauma causes latent abilities to come forth and that Tom is working like a broken flashlight, getting glimpses of things but not enough to know what they are. He then says the spirit that contacted Tom has asked for something and will get more upset when it does not get done. When Maggie asks about Jake and his abilities, Neil smiles and says "Much better flashlight."
As time goes on Tom and his family get more and more plagued by the spirit and Tom becomes more and more unhinged, eventually having to ask Maggie's sister Lisa to undo what she did. She is unable to when the spirit interferes and instead of being hypnotized to sleep he is told by the spirit to dig.
Maggie next finds Tom in their backyard digging it up. She asks him what he is doing and all he repeats is... "I'm supposed to dig." Maggie leaves to go to a relative's house (for her grandmother's funeral, whose death Tom 'saw' the instant that it happened far away) as Tom's behavior becomes out of control. He begins to tear apart the house with power tools, eventually getting a jackhammer from an appliance store. While using a sledgehammer he accidentally swings back too far and knocks down a shoddy brick wall in the basement and finally finds the wrapped up and decomposed body of Samantha. As he touches her he is thrown into a vision of how she was killed, eventually learning that Adam and Kurt lured Samantha into the house, then killed her inadvertently during a struggle after they tried to rape her.
Maggie is shown at her relative's house with Jake, telling him she is going to go home and check on his father. When asked if he wants to go, Jake declines, saying he is scared of the feathers.
In the next scene Tom walks out of the basement in a daze and walks to his friend Frank's house and brings him to the basement and shows him the body and tells him the story. Frank breaks down and admits the boys told their fathers about the murder. He then points a gun at Tom and tells him to leave the basement. As Tom flees upstairs a shot is fired, presumably Frank shooting himself. Immediately after there is a knock on the door. Both Kurt and his father Harry (Conor O'Farrell) are standing there wondering why the house is torn apart. Tom nervously says he is looking for a leaky water main. Harry, who already knows Tom has found the body he and his son put in the basement while remodeling, rushes in and grabs Tom while Kurt prepares to shoot him. A honk from out front stops them and they turn off the lights as Maggie comes walking in. Harry grabs Maggie and takes her hostage and is about to shoot her when Frank appears (he didn't shoot himself) and shoots both Kurt and Harry to save the couple. As Harry dies, his own gun goes off in the air, shooting straight up into Jake's bedroom and going right through Jake's pillow, leaving feathers floating down as per Jake's ominous warning. Frank then walks out and sits on the front steps saying they were going to kill him and Maggie, mirroring one of Tom's earlier visions. Tom then notices Samantha's spirit. She puts on her glasses and coat, smiles, then walks down the road and disappears.
At the end of the movie, we see the family packing up a U-Haul and moving out of the house. As they drive away, Tom and Maggie look happy. In the final shot, however, we see Jake looking out of the window as a hubbub of ghostly voices gets louder and louder. Jake tries to cover his ears to drown them out.[1]
Cast
Box Office
The film opened at number 3, and made $5,811,664 and stayed in the top 10 for 3 weeks, after a 14 week run, the total domestic gross was $21,073,708[2]. In the UK the film grossed £818,213. Worldwide the film grossed more than $23 million.
References
External links
