Those with highly developed psychic abilities have tapped into a much larger and more complicated universe than the rest of us. Sometimes a person can enter this realm too quickly and overload his/her physical systems. The result as depicted in this psychological thriller written and directed by David Koepp (The Trigger Effect) can be catastrophic.
At a party, Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon), a working-class resident of Chicago who's skeptical about supernatural powers, is hypnotized by Lisa (Illeana Douglas), his sister-in-law. She orders him to be more open in his thinking. Much to the dismay of his wife, Maggie (Kathryn Erbe), he is suddenly felled by headaches and nightmares and obsessed with dreadful visions of the anguished ghost of a young girl in his home. It turns out that his young son Jake (Zachary David Cope) shares these visions and is a gifted psychic himself.
All psychic ability is nothing more than a kind of heightened attention and extended awareness. Stir of Echoes touches upon some of the same themes as The Sixth Sense with its exploration of the presence of the dead in our lives. However, this drama based on a 1958 novel by Richard Matheson uses violence rather than a spiritual epiphany to resolve the crisis in the Witzky house.