The Echo Game

The Echo Game was featured in a television special called The 50 Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen. I’m a pretentious hipster so its spot in that list made me go into it with expectations of an obscure yet quality horror film. Not so! The Echo Game is bad and I don’t know what the people involved with The 50 Best Horror Movies were smoking to make them sing its praises.

The film begins with a woman named Rachel being hunted by an unknown agency. This agency quickly prove themselves more than willing to kill her. Upon her death, the mysterious agency realizes this woman doesn’t have what they’re looking for. So, the begin looking into Rachel’s ex, April. April and her partner Casey are raising a ten year old daughter. April believes Rachel’s been dead for years when suddenly all these mysterious figures show up and suggest that she isn’t. Additionally, April’s daughter Sarah begins acting strangely and talking about an imaginary friend who maybe isn’t so imaginary.

By far, the best part about The Echo Game is its casual treatment of WLW leads. A lesbian couple in a 2009 horror film brings to mind lots of expectations of exploitation, titillation and mild homophobia. The Echo Game bucks all of these trends. April and Casey’s relationship isn’t mere titillation nor a symptom of some sort of moral or character flaw. They’re just some committed ladies co-parenting a child. This also makes The Echo Game a great example of an uncommon plot for WLW characters and couples. The film in no way hinges on these characters’ sexuality. It’s an equality win to see a standard, domestic couple have their lives intruded on by a mysterious agency trying to create psychic children.

Unfortunately, the worst part of The Echo Game is pretty much everything else. To begin with, the film has chosen one of the least interesting paths to tell this particular story. There are few horror moments in the film. Instead, it focuses on April unravelling the mystery and having relationship issues due to her keeping secrets. April is so removed from the core premise of the story that too much time is spent bringing her into the narrative. The Echo Game is (or at least, should be) about an agency that did psychic experiments on children and is now hunting them down. That’s so cool! Perhaps because of budget or just bad focus, this element is heavily minimized.

The directing for The Echo Game is weird in how aggressively normal it is. The Echo Game has the look of any given serialized supernatural TV series from the early 2000s. Think Ghost Whisperer, Medium or Tru Calling. The fact that it looks so much like a TV episode does make it better directed than I might have expected given the quality of its script. There is a level of directorial precision and certainty often missing from similar low budget films. What is missing however, is any sense of originality or creative risk. Even as far as television directing goes, it’s middle of the pack. Fringe was released the same year as The Echo Game. It has similar themes of psychic experiments on children. It also has both better horror elements and stronger, more amibitous directing. It’s not as gay but still, you should probably just watch Fringe.

I really wanted to like The Echo Game. I want to support this horror film with a committed, non-objectified lesbian couple who get drawn into a psychic conspiracy. But the execution of the ideas is just not up to par. The horror elements are too few, the acting is uniformly bad and the ending psychic “fight scene” is laughable. There’s a good movie or, more likely, a good TV series on here somewhere. It just wasn’t the one that actually exists.

Overall rating: 4.5/10

Other WLW films in similar genres