Echoes, the review: suspense where are you?

Every review his dilemma is so that too of Echoes, a Netflix limited series about tricky identical twins, may have worked on paper but not quite on screen. It has the elements of an intriguing thriller: two inscrutable sisters, both played by Michelle Monaghan of Mission: Impossible, whose impenetrable bond masks disturbing secrets; a Gone Girl mystery which reveals something sinister under an enviable tranquility.

What if twin girls switched places every year, unbeknownst to anyone in their lives? That’s the premise of Netflix’s Echoes, a series that opens with a shrewd and successful author named Gina (Michelle Monaghan), who lives an extremely ordinary life in an austere Los Angeles mansion with her therapist husband, Charlie. (Daniel Sunjata). There will be SPOILERS from here on out, be warned!

Living in Mount Echo, a modest farming town halfway across the country, she is Gina’s identical twin sister Leni, a rancher with a profuse Southern accent 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 life of the twins is interchangeable at the snap of the fingers.

Gina and Leni have their deception down to a science, their own twisted lives, that is, until Leni goes missing. After receiving news of her sister’s sudden disappearance, Gina returns to Mount Echo, only to discover a note suggesting that Leni may actually have escaped. At this point, we learn that Gina is actually the real Leni residing at Mount Echo and wielding pigtails. Yes, keeping track of who’s who is confusing and remains confusing for most of the series.

After a couple of episodes, Gina returns to Mount Echo with her tail between her legs and Leni is able to go back to just being a twin. But at this point, the action has only just begun, as the perpetually dubious small-town sheriff Floss (Karen Robinson) is bent on locking up at least one of the twins over the church fire. So when Dylan appears mysteriously dead, Floss’ ambition turns into aobsession. Here is the trailer posted on YouTube:

Dark truths

We continue the Echoes review by saying that as present and past storylines collide, the creator Vanessa Gazy increases the sense of urgency through a quick montage and the jarring splicing of chilling flashbacks into the main narrative.

As a result, there’s a constant, nagging sense of pent-up mystery and a sense that Gina and Leni’s vast collection of secrets will soon erupt in a violent and cataclysmic event.

As Leni gets closer to finding Gina in the first few episodes, for example, the audience gets closer to discovering her dark truths lurking in the twins’ past – truths full of raging fires, cruel masochism and secret affairs.

From a narrative point of view, the new Netflix series Echoes, which follows a pair of identical twin girls who switch places every year, is undeniably compelling. During the seven episodes of the TV series,

Gazy masterfully draws various suspenseful storylines like a rubber band that stretches to its limit, promising an eventual, violent snap.

But as the episodes quickly gain momentum, the series falls victim to a death trap that miniseries thrillers often make: the creators are too enthusiastic about the endless possibilities of suspense at their disposal, and the credibility of the story flies out the window.

So the real Leni does what any normal person would do: she stays on Mount Echo and disguises herself as both her and her twin in an attempt to solve the mystery of the real Gina. What follows is a gripping mystery melodrama full of twists, turns and sensational improbabilities: after a short period of investigation, Leni discovers that Gina was indeed involved in a botched elopement with her high school sweetheart, Dylan (Jonathan Tucker). , a bad boy in a suit who he lost touch with after he and Gina got caught in the middle of a mysterious (and highly suspicious) church fire.

Less is more

Gina is a bestselling writer who lives in an airy Los Angeles mansion and drives a Tesla, Leni runs a horse farm in their rural town of Mt Echo, Virginia. Both are married to handsome men: Gina to Charlie (Daniel Sunjata), Leni to brawler Jack (Matt Bomer). But they are very devoted to each other, writing their daily private lives in a shared virtual diary until the day Leni disappears in a suspected burglary, taking Gina back to Mount Echo.

Unfortunately, little of the tension you might glean from that description comes to the screen in this seven-episode series, which has some wild gestures but a very light emotional burden.

Created by Australian writer-director Vanessa Gazy, Echoes is both unbelievable and poorly edited, neither of which is a crime if you can deliver at least a dramatic hook: suspense, unease, a suspicious, haunting backstory, envy, sex.

Echoes seeks all of this, but struggles to capture a real feel, its mysteries hollow, its deceptions shallow, and its varied tones off-beat at best.

It commits one of the real sins of top TV series, which is to be boring.

A wasted opportunity

A theme used far too many times: People often see identical twins as a gimmick. They are tricksters who deceive others, or they are the terrifying omens in The Shining, or they are alien beings who can read each other’s minds.

There were many reasons why the first episode of Echoes, created and written by Vanessa Gazy, impressed us. The first was the wooden acting of many people who have been excellent in other projects. Monaghan is particularly melodramatic when we hear her writing texts about her to her sister in this online diary which makes no sense to us.

But she’s not the only one whose performance is extraordinarily bad. Bomer plays flat, and the usually reliable O’Neill seems to have only slightly altered his usually cantankerous persona into a cantankerous character and that’s it. And Robinson’s Sheriff Floss might be a little too popular for the tone of this series.

It doesn’t help that all these fine actors are burdened with lines that are just plain bad.

All of which would be fine if the very idea the show is built on made sense. Why on God’s green earth would these women change their lives so often, meaning they spent all the time they have in the other sister’s life lying to their family and friends? And when it’s revealed at the end of the first episode that Gina is really Leni, we just have to scratch our heads; we were still unclear as to which Monaghan sister was currently playing and which she was gone.

Whatever the deception, film and TV makers often favor the gimmick over exploring the real psychological question of what it’s actually like to be a twin.

Gazy falls victim to gimmicks, and through this he unwittingly creates the chrysalises of a pair of the most compelling characters to ever grace the silver screen. But instead of developing charactersalready questioning what it might be doing to one’s psyche inhabiting two different lives at the same time, treat their preferred lifestyle as, for lack of better wording, twins doing twin shit.

Echoes is available to watch on Netflix.