I should say that there is a small, tiny twist near the end that adds an interesting element to the movie. Though I won't say what it is, you can figure it out from the block party dynamics. This little twist is nice because it makes the movie a little less obvious.

Let me blatantly ruin one other thing: At the end of the movie, Jake refuses to come with his mom back to the house when she goes to pick up Tom. He says he's scared of feathers. Sure enough, during the climactic battle, a gun goes off and the bullet shoots through the ceiling, up through the second floor, passing through Jake's bed and pillow. Pillow feathers float in slo-mo around the room. "Oh, how prescient," you think. "Had Jake come home, he would have been killed!" Not so fast. If Jake had come home, he would still be in the car waiting for daddy and mommy to come out of the house; his mom would not have brought him in, put him in his jammies, washed his face, tucked him into bed, read him a story, then wandered the dark house with the flip-blade knife looking for her possibly deranged husband. No, the kid was afraid of feathers because the writer thought it'd be really cool. The kid didn't save his own life, he just allowed the writer to get off on his own keenly honed dramatic writing brilliance. (One theory suggested to me is that Jake's saying he's afraid of feathers is supposed to throw you off, making you think of the dead girl's coat, which was shown vaguely a couple times. Then the bullet through the pillow is a surprise! I don't buy it because the film is too unintelligent to suggest something so subtle. Hell, that jacket's probably filled with poly fiber anyway.)

Stir of Echoes is full of sloppy, meaningless crap that's there solely to ease the writer's task of making the movie flow. For instance, there's the short episode where Jake gets kidnapped. Tom sees red flashes in his (real-life) vision, obviously a warning of some kind. Then red lights all over the city start making a funky WAAAAK WAAAAK noise at him. He finally understands what the warning means (though we're never treated to an explanation of how or why), and he saves his kid. Then the idea is dropped and red never means anything ever again. Worse of all, the kidnapping promises to take the movie on some unpredictable voyage, then turns out to be just a hollow, over-realized plot device to get to the exposition about Samantha. That's called bad writing, folks.

Another example: The wise black man who can recognize the Shining in people. You think I'm kidding. Nope. Maybe it's some kind of lazy homage to Kubrick and King, but there really is a black man who recognizes Jake as a seer and then promptly asks Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) to have Tom come visit him that night. Maggie visits him instead, he gets mad, she persists, and he goes off on some exposition meant solely for the dummies in the audience who haven't picked up by now that Tom is seeing a ghost and the ghost needs help. Then the black man promptly vanishes from the movie, his redundant purpose served. More bad writing accomplished.

We can blame David Koepp for this bad writing. (The story itself comes from a novel by Richard Matheson, who also wrote the book "What Dreams May Come.") David has a pretty mediocre string of writing credits trailing behind him (Snake Eyes, Jurassic Parks I and II, The Shadow, Death Becomes Her), so it's no surprise Stir of Echoes is as mediocre as it is. As a double treat, David also directed! That way he could make sure his mediocre script would be brought fully and correctly to mediocre fruition without any meddling by second parties.

Mediocre doesn't necessarily mean terrible. The movie does give some nice jumps and some effective skin crawls, mostly in the beginning, so you can always see it for that shivery late-night scare. However, Stir of Echoes makes you realize just how special The Sixth Sense really is, that the latter deals with very similar subjects and themes with more aplomb, more intelligence, and less gimmickry than the former. Stir of Echoes only has the creeps and some decent acting going for it; the rest is just pap.

As a final service, I have created an alphabetical list of the major cast members for your convenience. This should be helpful for those of you keeping Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon databases.

Cope, Zachary David
Douglas, Illeana
Dunn, Kevin
Erbe, Kathryn
Morrison, Jennifer
O'Farrell, Conor
Smith, Eddie Bo, Jr.

—Steve

Thanks to Mandy for providing grammatical insight. She's is a genius.