Filmmaniak

Stir of Echoes very much resembles a Stephen King thriller with horror elements, regardless of its striking similarity to The Shining (and The Sixth Sense from the same year), so in retrospect it makes sense that Koepp got the opportunity to direct an adaptation of King’s Secret Window a few years later. The story is actually trivial, unlike the narrative structure, which intentionally throws viewers into a state of confusion as to how the main protagonist feels as he has newly gained psychic abilities. All the way up to the climax, it is unclear which of his visions are echoes of the past, which are glimpses of the future, why the ghost appears to him and what it wants from him. The film has a solid atmosphere and it is sufficiently effective as a ghost story, and everything in it fits together nicely. The hypnotic scene with an empty cinema is excellent. Nevertheless, everything revolving around the topic of a gradually deepening marital crisis comes across as artificial and contrived. As time passes, the lapses in logic pile up and some promising motifs are only hinted at and remain unused. Like the work with suspense, the actors are not particularly dazzling. Seen 25 years after its release, Stir of Echoes has aged only minimally in the intervening years.

Full of screenwriting/dramaturgical weaknesses, Immaculate is a mostly consumable horror B-movie that, given the number of holes in the rather incoherent plot, apparently suffered major labour pains during its inception, just as its main protagonist did. However, there are two factors that give rise to a certain degree of entertainment value. The first is the narrative twists in the story, which is divided into thirds in line with the number of trimesters in a pregnancy, through which the film gradually transforms from offering hints of ghost horror to sectarian/satanic horror and then to a spectacularly brutal exploitation (or rather nunsploitation) slasher flick in which traditional religious objects are used as lethal weapons. The other factor is the extreme similarity of Immaculate to the better-written and filmed horror movie The First Omen from the same year, which starts with an identical initial situation (a young American novice travels to Italy to serve God and miraculously becomes pregnant). Immaculate shares with that film a lot of other plot and thematic elements, but only until roughly the midpoint, because it then becomes the perfect antithesis to The First Omen in the second half, not only with respect to the work with the Christ and Antichrist characters, but also with respect to the contradictory behaviour of the main characters. Otherwise, it offers what seems to be the established standard in recent horror movies featuring nuns, with expansive cloisters, hospices and orphanages enhanced with adjoining cellars, attics, vaults, catacombs and other forbidden places.

In the Land of Brothers is made up of three loosely connected stories set in different decades and inspired by the lives of actual people, specifically Afghans living in neighbouring Iran, which never accepted them as equal citizens. We see the injustices and tragic events experienced by the migrants and their descendants from the perspective of a student forced into conscripted labour, a maid trying to conceal her husband’s death from her employers, who hired the couple illegally, and parents learning of the death of their son, who had gone behind their backs to enlist in the army. This powerful and sharply directed drama is driven by the realistic acting performances, well-thought-out picture compositions and the forcefulness and gravity of the situations depicted. Conversely, what seems slightly problematic is the interconnecting of the three stories through the characters’ compulsion to hide their problems from others, which is not always sufficiently legitimised through their motivations.