Stir of Echoes

There's money in the dead, as the makers of The Sixth Sense have learned and as Martin Scorsese will probably confirm with his upcoming, aptly titled Bringing Out the Dead. There are many more to come. If you can't beat mortality, you might as well make a killing with it. Not that David Koepp's Stir of Echoes is exploitative and strictly generic -- at least, not to begin with.

Kevin Bacon is gruffly convincing as Tom, a Chicago family man and disgruntled phone-company lineman who's goaded by his flaky sister-in-law Lisa (Illeana Douglas) into undergoing hypnosis at a beery party. Whereupon he starts seeing things -- a shattered fingernail, a gray-faced girl on a sofa -- and the Rolling Stones' "Paint It Black" keeps running through his head. Pretty soon he's addicted to orange juice and digging up the backyard.

Koepp, whose work has ranged from the pretentious but fitfully creepy The Trigger Effect to the pure hackery of the Jurassic Park screenplay, here finds a more or less happy medium. He's adept at re-creating the gritty ambiance of Tom's Bridgeport neighborhood and the frustration and comfort of his tough family love; he's even more effective at subtly disrupting this world with intimations of madness and revelation. Unfortunately, with its tired borrowings from The Exorcist, The Shining (Tom's young psychic son, played by Zachary David Cope, at times outshines the young adept in The Sixth Sense), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Echoes just leads to another dead end.

-- Peter Keough