He never goes in to work anymore, because he spends all his time waiting around the house for the girl- who Tom believes to be a ghost- to appear again. And this, as far as everyone else in the movie is concerned, is when Tom begins to lose it. Sitting on his couch is a young girl, whom he has never seen before, but who seems at the same time strangely familiar. When at last he gives up on sleeping and goes downstairs to the living room, he has the creepiest of them all. That night, Tom is plagued by nightmares and hallucinations. Tom tells Maggie he feels sort of sick now, and they both go home. The whole business frightens Tom clear out of his hypnosis, and he regains consciousness to see everybody in the room staring at him with awe that’s about to turn into fear. What he sees is some pretty alarming stuff- something about a teenage girl in a seemingly abandoned house, something about someone being attacked, something about breaking teeth and fingernails. The screen shows us what Lisa tells Tom to picture as he goes under, and what he sees in his mind while he’s there. Instead (and this is one of the movie’s neater tricks), we see the scene from Tom’s perspective. We don’t get to see what Tom does under hypnosis, but it’s apparently pretty funny and sort of disturbing at the same time. After much initial resistance- probably because she doesn’t really think it will work on someone as hard-boiled as Tom, and she’d rather not look like an ass in front of the whole neighborhood- she relents and puts Tom under. One night, when she, Tom, and Maggie are all at a neighborhood party, the subject comes up in conversation and Tom, ever the skeptic, essentially dares Lisa to hypnotize him. One of the flakier things that Lisa does is to study hypnotism. It’s too bad for Tom, too, because his basically adversarial relationship with his sister-in-law is about to bite him on the ass big time. In fact, the person who seems most troubled by the whole situation is Maggie’s rather flaky sister, Lisa ( Cape Fear’s Illeana Douglas), who has always thought of Tom as a no-account jerk, mainly, it seems, because she considers him to be unimaginative and narrow-minded. But these are the sort of people who go through life with an attitude of “well, we’ll do what we have to do,” and it isn’t long before Tom is talking about abandoning his band’s projected tour and arranging to work massive overtime at his phone company job. Neither she nor Tom brings home much money, and it’s hard enough to make ends meet with one kid in the house. Maggie has just learned that she is pregnant again. Then the credits roll, and the subject is dropped in favor of something much more familiar. The first scene has their young son, Jake (Zachary David Cope- not much of an actor, but a genuinely creepy little kid) conversing in the darkened living room with an unseen presence of some sort. Basically, Stir of Echoes is about Tom (the apparently ubiquitous Kevin Bacon) and Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), a young working-class couple whose prosaic, hardscrabble lives are intruded upon by the paranormal, partly as the result of a seemingly innocent party trick. Life works the same way- its net vector is never apparent except in retrospect- and grounding the assorted weirdness so firmly in the day-to-day existence of the characters does much to compensate for the film’s numerous weaknesses. In all honesty, I think that’s the main strength of the movie. The story is a bit difficult to synopsize most of the material that actually advances the plot is incidental to the scenes in which it appears. You could do much worse than to take one of his books as the starting point for your movie. His works will never be required reading in any high school English class, but he knows how to tell a good no-bullshit horror story. By Richard Matheson, I of course mean Richard “ I Am Legend” Matheson, Richard “ The Shrinking Man” Matheson. Stir of Echoes will probably not be remembered as said boom’s high-water mark, but it is based on a novel by Richard Matheson, and that’s nothing to take lightly. The great horror movie boom of 1999 booms on.
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