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Early on in Stir of Echoes (1999), Tom (Kevin Bacon) wistfully tells his pregnant wife Maggie (Kathryn Erbe) that he never expected his life to be so ordinary. Is there a surer way to jinx yourself into getting that ordinary life upended in a movie? That inevitable upending starts a little while later at a gathering with some friends in Tom and Maggie’s blue-collar Chicago neighborhood. When the party gets into its burned-out, hanging-out-in-the-living-room-with-nothing-to-do phase, Tom’s sister-in-law, Lisa (Illeana Douglas), suggests they liven things up by letting her try out her mostly untapped hypnotist skills on someone. 

Cynical Tom offers his mind and body mostly because he thinks that stuff is silly. Then he’s gobsmacked to find out that he’s among the 8 percent of the U.S. population particularly susceptible to hypnosis. Tom quickly goes under —and so deeply that even after Lisa jabs him with a pin he doesn’t wake up — and afterward starts having visions with frightening regularity: specifically one perhaps involving the ghost of a teenage girl (Jennifer Morrison) who looks at him expectantly whenever she appears to him, like she’s certain he can help her in some way.

This girl proves not to be a figment of Tom’s newly rattled imagination. His and Maggie’s son, Jake (Zachary David Cope), also seems to have psychic powers. Unlike Tom, he seems able to with easy directness communicate with the teenage girl. He asks her innocently if it hurts to be dead; later, he clarifies with her what she wants him to do next after he successfully convinces Maggie to hire this girl’s sister as his babysitter for the evening. (The sister understandably isn’t very happy when her little client for the night casually tells her he’s been in close contact with a sibling missing for the last six months.) 

Fashioning himself into a savior figure as the visions pile, Tom becomes fanatical about getting to the bottom of a case that, as he picks up more clues, seems to suggest this girl’s fate is almost certainly tied up with this house. With Tom and a nonetheless freaked-out-by-his-dad’s zealotry Jake in arms, Maggie becomes an odd woman out. Her patience is tested when she takes a look at the backyard and it’s being rabidly dug out by the boys of the house, and even more when a close relative dies and Tom is too lost in his self-appointed detective role to go and be by her side for the night. To boot, the couple are already financially strapped, and with Tom’s continual waste of his sick days docks in pay are imminent. Maggie’s bafflement as Tom gets lost in what is either a delusional messiah complex or something real is one of the film’s most effective emotional beats. It also recalls the progressively fraught repartee between Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson in The Shining (1980), although Bacon’s no-holds-barred passion never teeters into enough malice for us to worry for Maggie’s safety.  

With its supernatural thrust, it’s a surprise when the big reveal in Stir of Echoes turns out to be a decidedly down-to-Earth case of everyday misogynistic evil turned particularly ugly. It might actually be David Koepp’s best trick, using a complex, woo-woo setup to get us somewhere proportionate to life, genuinely sad and tragic. That and his portrayal of this little Chicago community and its everybody-knows-everybody quality, plus his way of getting very good performances out of his cast. (The MVP is Douglas as the nonannoyingly kooky family member whose for-a-laugh interest in hypnosis and the supernatural comes to feel like comic relief, especially as it relates to what it unleashes. She was just trying to have a fun time!) 

Stir of Echoes feels a lot longer than its objectively short 99 minutes. Not much goes on between the initial discovery of Tom’s new psychic abilities and the doling out of the answers he spends the whole movie searching for. There’s a lot of banal waiting for another vision, spending time in strange dreams and with concerning hallucinations. With 20 minutes or so lobbed off, Stir of Echoes might have actually had some suspenseful moments. But there’s so much waiting around for something significant to happen that anything resembling tension feels more like a pick-me-up amid some daydreaming. If only we, like Tom, could change Stir of Echoes’ trajectory by complaining aloud about its ordinariness.