Echoes

Interesting premise, poor execution. Anna Parker (French) is a writer who is at the mercy of sleep paralysis that brings about frightening visions. On the advice of her boyfriend Paul (Brand) she takes a trip to a house in the desert, where her visions become more "frightening." In actuality, there are no scares here, just a series of scenes that move at a tortoise's pace and does nothing to hold the viewer's attention. You'd get more frights from a rerun of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse." This is a Netflix film, and the quality of that service has become mediocre at best, and just think: these are the folks who knocked Blockbuster out of the game.

This could have been a great thriller. The idea of sisters changing lives was a great concept. But the script is poorly written. And the acting of the Leni character was poorly executed. That fake Southern accent was atrocious. And her demure was unconvincing. Half the time I didn't understand the relationship between the characters. I kept saying is that their other sister? Are those two people friends? Did these girls actually grow up in this area because everybody acts like they don't know them very well.

I decided to watch the whole thing to just find out what happened. But it was very painful. Very painful. My recommendation is don't even start it.

When I saw the trailer for this movie , I thought it looked really creepy and but now I wish I didn't see the trailer before the movie

As I was watching the movie , I felt like already seen half of it as the trailer so most of creepy parts in the movie

however there are some turns in the plot , which did confuse me for a while but in the end most of the movie is very predicable

There are one or two were still tad creepy but those scenes are in the trailer

The acting was okay but there were poor acting in some parts of the movie

Frankly I did not expect much when I came across this film, as I was drawn to watch it merely for the fact it is shot in Joshua Tree, which is one of my favorite spots to visit. I must confess I enjoyed this movie a lot and it kept me on the edge of my seat, although it is not packed with horror which I expected. The movie is rather a thriller with supernatural elements, which is more my personal taste anyway so this wasn't a disappointment to me. The performances were surprisingly decent, although I at times found it hard to believe the romantic relationship between the two lead characters. In the first half hour of the movie the pace was is bit slow, but the visuals really makes up for this and then it turns into a great story with a few nice twists.

Scenic Joshua tree locations and modern architecture accent Echoes, a stylish supernatural thriller. In yet the latest horror happening featuring, what else, a writer summoning up the occult, independent filmmaker Nils Trim blends stalker elements with phantasmagoria and tribal mythology in this Southwest supernatural whodunit. In it, Anna (Kate French) is an aspiring writer who suffers from a few minor, common psychological issues, such as partially waking from chronic nightmares only to experience ghastly hallucinations while trapped in a state of sleep paralysis. OK, maybe that's not so minor or common.

But heavily medicated Anna has a solution that she thinks will provide good therapy for her condition: spend several days alone, mostly in her underwear, at her boyfriend's curtain-less glass house, It's OK, nobody will see her and fixate upon her -the only other person around for miles is a shadowy, lurking, unshaven man with no fixed address or US citizenship, who's squatting in a decaying trailer a few hundred meters away. There will be plenty of peace and quiet. too. This plot of land, renowned for the perplexing, fatal disappearance of its previous owner, is so isolated from civilization, there's not even any cell phone reception.

Makes sense.

What could possibly go wrong with this idea?

Well, plenty as it turns out, when Anna promptly runs afoul of an apparent wendigo -a particularly malignant one -who fixates upon and sets out to possess her. Plenty of strange occurrences ensue, some of which demand that we accept characters' unlikely choices, and forgive lengthy exposition at the end revealing a complex and melodramatically sensational back-story explanation. But then this is horror, and horror tales and movies often require that we accept melodramatically sensational back-stories, because if we insist upon being too logically demanding and analytic, we might reject the ideas of monsters and ghosts altogether.

So we shall allow Echoes to take its artistic license with the credible, we will enjoy its unusual twists and unpredictable, if not illogical turns, because in addition to having some tense moments which are really scary (an increasingly rare commodity in horror movies), Echoes showcases arresting locations and surreal dream sequences emphasized by striking cinematography.

Viewers may recognize actor Steven Brand, who plays Ana's boyfriend, from The Scorpion King, and the HBO series The Mind of the Married Man, and Kate French from horror movies Sutures and Channeling. Perhaps the most interesting cast members in Echoes however are cute Oxley, the dog who plays Ana's canine companion "Shadow," with almost human expressiveness, and in a sense, the boyfriend's modernist glass house itself, which features prominently in the film and bears a strong resemblance to the historic Stahl House, a Los Angeles landmark used as a location in numerous films, photo-shoots and ads.