Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a Thirst for Twists
The post Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a Thirst for Twists appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of Echoes, “Falls.”]
The Pitch: What if two adult identical twins swapped places every year, unbeknownst to everyone in their lives? Such is the premise of Netflix’s Echoes, a show that opens on a shrewd and successful author named Gina (Michelle Monaghan), who lives an exceedingly normal life in an austere Los Angeles mansion with her doting therapist husband, Charlie (Daniel Sunjata).
Living in Mount Echo, a modest farm town halfway across the country, is Gina’s identical twin sister, Leni, a ranch owner with a hearty southern drawl and permanently braided hair. Every year on their birthday, Gina and Leni switch places for a year, unbeknownst to anyone else: From their accents to their devoted husbands to Leni’s young daughter, Mattie (Gable Swanlund), everything in the twins’ lives is interchangeable at the snap of a finger.
Twin Flames: Gina and Leni have their deception down to a science, and all is hunky dory in their twisted lives — that is, until Leni goes missing. Upon receiving the news of her sister’s sudden disappearance, Gina returns to Mount Echo, only to discover a note which suggests that Leni might have in fact run away. (At this point, we learn that Gina is actually the real Mount Echo-residing, braid-wielding Leni. Yes, keeping track of who is who is confusing, and remains confusing throughout the majority of the show.)
So real Leni does what any normal person would do: She stays in Mount Echo and dresses up as both her and her twin in an attempt to solve real Gina’s mystery. What follows is a thrilling mystery-melodrama ripe with twists, turns, and glaring improbabilities: After a brief period of sleuthing, Leni learns that Gina was actually involved in a botched runaway with her high school sweetheart, Dylan (Jonathan Tucker), a leather-jacket-wearing bad-boy whom she lost touch with after he and Gina got caught in the middle of a mysterious (and very suspicious) church fire.
Echoes (Netflix)
A Tense Twiniseries: A couple of episodes in, Gina returns to Mount Echo with her tail between her legs, and Leni is able to go back to being just one twin. But at this point, the action has only really just begun, as perpetually-dubious small-town sheriff Floss (Karen Robinson) is hell-bent on locking at least one of the twins up for the church fire. So when Dylan mysteriously shows up dead, Floss’s ambition turns into an obsession.
As present and past storylines collide, creator Vanessa Gazy cranks up the sense of urgency through rapid editing, and the jarring splicing of chilling flashbacks into the main narrative. As a result, there is a constant, nagging sense of pent-up mystery, and a feeling that Gina and Leni’s extensive collection of secrets will soon erupt into a violent, cataclysmic event. As Leni gets closer to finding Gina in the first few episodes, for example, so, too, does the audience get closer to discovering the dark truths lurking in the twins’ pasts – truths full of violent fires, cruel masochism, and covert affairs.
From a narrative standpoint, Netflix’s new series Echoes, which follows a pair of identical twins who switch places every year, is undeniably compelling. Throughout the show’s seven episodes, Gazy masterfully draws out various suspenseful storylines like an elastic band stretching to its very limit, promising an eventual, violent snap.
But as the episodes quickly gather momentum, the show falls victim to a deadly trap that miniseries-thrillers often do: The creators get too excited about the endless possibilities for suspense at their fingertips, and the story’s credibility flies right out the window.
Echoes (Netflix)
A Disclaimer: This is probably a good place to mention that this critic is also an identical twin. My sister and I have no substantial physical traits that distinguish us from one another. When we were babies, our mother tied a bracelet around my right ankle because it was the only way she’d know who was who. Looking at photos of me and my twin as toddlers, I couldn’t confidently point myself out if a million dollars was on the line. To this day, I often get stopped on the street by strangers who mistake me for my twin.
I know what you want to ask: Have we ever tricked people like Gina and Leni? And the answer is yes, of course we have. In sixth grade, my sister persuaded me to be her for a day, only for me to find out that she had to stay in for recess because she hadn’t done her homework. She and I would routinely switch places during ballet class. Friend hangouts. Family gatherings. Why? Because it was fun. It was a secret, special power we had that no one else did.
All this is to say that I believe I have a unique insight into the bizarre psychology of Leni and Gina, and am humbly qualified to say that Gazy drastically overplays her hand with Echoes’ twin gimmick. Indeed, there is a problem that consistently lurks below the surface of the show: the Gina and Leni problem.
Speaking from experience, tricking people by pretending to be someone who shares your exact DNA is a kid’s wildest dream. But as you get older, being an identical twin becomes a whole different ball game. While the closeness you share with your twin is wonderful and undeniable, to be mistaken for someone else so routinely almost becomes a curse — as if your very identity has been indefinitely obscured.
A Tired Trope: People often see identical twins as a gimmick. They’re tricksters who deceive others, or they’re the terrifying bad omens in The Shining, or they’re alien beings who can read one anothers minds. Whatever the trickery is, film and TV creators often favor the gimmick over exploring the real psychological question of what it’s actually like to be a twin.
Gazy falls victim to gimmickry, and through this unwittingly creates the chrysalises of a couple of the most riveting characters to ever grace the silver screen. But instead of developing the characters by questioning what it might do to ones’ psyche to simultaneously inhabit two different lives, she treats their lifestyle of choice like, for lack of better wording, twins doing twin shit.
By doing this, she forgoes the potential of a fascinating psychological inquiry that could have been much more interesting than the surface level, plot-motivated examination that actually goes down – one which could have set Echoes apart from the neverending collection of high-concept content out there.
Indeed, multiple times, Gazy attempts to psychologize the twins, but in doing so she pushes the show’s high-stakes atmosphere too far, and loses a sense that she is dealing with real people. This yields moments that come across as far-fetched. In the final episode, “Falls,” for example, we learn that Leni saw her father, Victor (Michael O’Neill), drown her dying mother in a bathtub when she was younger – a moment Leni believes poisoned her and her sister and turned them into twisted adults.
But instead of tying up loose ends, the Victor reveal exists mostly for shock value. One can’t help but imagine that if Gazy hadn’t felt the pressure to embed increasingly dramatic twists into the show’s narrative, Echoes would have remained the fascinating character study about a pair of troubled identical twins that it was in the first couple episodes, instead of taking a sharp left turn into the realm of the ridiculous.
Echoes (Netflix)
A Mixed Bag of Performances: Despite the frustratingly shallow nature of her characters, Monaghan is unsurprisingly remarkable as Gina/Leni, playing the former with a sharp edge of wit and malice, and the latter with an undercurrent of frenzied desperation.
Her performance stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the cast, with Robinson leaning far too hard into the stereotypical county-sheriff who walks around with an air of forced nonchalance, and usually nimble performer Matt Bomer bringing nothing meaningful to the table as Leni’s naive, strikingly underwritten, salt-of-the-earth husband, Jack.
As a result, scenes between Gina and Leni are easily the best – though the CGI to make these scenes happen is so sloppy at times that you can practically see the lines where Monaghan was cut out in post-production before being pasted against an artificial background.
The Verdict: The clumsy visual effects are frustrating to watch, but easily the most frustrating thing about Echoes is that Gazy hit a goldmine with her premise, and had she simply trusted it enough to follow it without adding superfluous and nonsensical twists and turns, she could have ended up with something great.
Instead, the show functions like something of an experiment: one that started when someone asked just how many twists and cliffhangers could be squeezed into seven episodes. So if you’ve ever wondered that yourself, the answer can be found on Netflix today.
Where to Watch: Echoes is streaming now on Netflix.
Trailer:
Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a Thirst for Twists
Aurora Amidon
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