Let’s use the release of Amityville: Where the Echo Lives (now streaming on Max) to ponder the current state of the Amityville Horror franchise. You’re likely aware that the original 1979 Amityville Horror film – based on real-life claims of paranormal disturbances in an Amityville, New York home where a man murdered his family in 1974 – was a pretty big hit, spawning seven sequels during the ’80s and ’90s. A Ryan Reynolds-starring remake emerged in 2005, and a few years later, film producers apparently realized that the word “Amityville” refers to a real place and therefore isn’t subject to trademark, so they started slapping it on cheapo direct-to-video horror movies. There’s more than 50 of these movies now (!), and things started getting pretty silly with Amityville Vibrator, Amityville in Space and Amityville Death Toilet, to name a few. Amityville: Where the Echo Lives is one of five such movies released in 2024, and it’s one of the most amateurish movies I’ve ever seen taking up space on a major streaming outlet. And yes, that’s saying a lot.
The Gist: CHICAGO. No, really, CHICAGO. Notably, a location nowhere near Amityville. There will be no explanation for this, or for anything that happens in this confused, tedious snooze of a movie. It’s where Heather (Sarah McDonald) lives, working as a paranormal investigator. We’ll get into her story in a second. First, we have to wade through several screens of text that are full of typos and grammatical errors, and go on and on about how many children go missing every year in the United States. Then, a scene in which a woman sweeping the floor of an attic watches a door move by itself, its hinges creaking. Her eyes go wide, which is the most dynamic action we’ll see in all 89 minutes of this movie. No, really. Then she calls Heather to come check the place out for spooks and/or specters.
Now, about Heather. She’s a real brooder. Doesn’t smile much, doesn’t seem to be very happy. She’s a ghost expert like her father, who’s dead. We watch her record something I think is best described as a vlog (hey, remember vlogs?), directed at someone named John, who’s perhaps an old boyfriend or a brother or buddy, and I assume he’s dead? Can’t be sure. There will be no explanation for this, either. We soon find ourselves immersed in the deadly dull minutiae of Heather’s life: She goes for a jog, she takes a shower, she makes a snack, she googles things, she texts a friend, she opens the fridge, she closes the fridge, she opens the fridge, she closes the fridge, she opens the fridge, she sleeps. There’s an extended shot of a teakettle boiling on her stove, and several angles of Heather getting comfy in bed before falling asleep. I think director Carlos Ayala thinks this stuff is pretty profound and poetic, packed with insight, detail and symbolism, but in reality, it’s something I’d recommend serial insomniacs should see.
Heather plops herself in the allegedly haunted attic with a video camera and audio recorder. She/we get visions of a girl (Breanna Rossi) who went missing, apparently murdered by a creep. In a few sequences that ninth-grade film students might find a tad cheesy, Heather has dreams bathed in midnight-blue ethereal imagery. I think this means she’s communicating with the dead girl? I also think she secretly wants to make contact with her dead dad? Meanwhile, we get to watch black screens soundtracked by car doors closing and the din of traffic. Sometimes, the black screens are cluttered with words about Sarah’s struggles with alcohol and how sad she is about her dead dad. One of the black screens goes on for minutes at a time. Minutes! Of a black screen! I think this movie might be art.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Netflix series Headspace Guide to Sleep. I haven’t seen any of the other Amityville cash-ins (prayers up for those who have), but I was yearning for a death toilet or shark or tornado to liven this thing up.
Performance Worth Watching: BEEEEP. We’re sorry – the number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again.
Memorable Dialogue: A Heather voiceover provides profound insight that only a true-pro paranormal investigator can share: “I wish there was a way to know what’s on the other side. But the only way to know for sure is to die, and there’s no coming back from that.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Let’s be careful not to conflate Where the Echo Lives’ narrative methodology with what’s known as “slow cinema,” which aims for a kind of hypnotic immersion in the world of a film via languorous pacing and penetrating cinematography. This is not Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, although honestly, being eerie supernatural stories, they’re at least on the same thematic continent. But Echo stretches about seven minutes of plot to feature-length, and is the cinematic equivalent of glacial migration. It makes a student film look like Fanny and Alexander. It makes The Amityville Curse look like The Shining. It makes an iPhone video of your cat look like Beau Travail. You get the idea.
It’s also comically inept on all technical and storytelling fronts. The audio is atrocious at the beginning of the movie, so Ayala opted to sloppily dub over dialogue in later scenes. The cinematography consists of countless blurry closeups of McDonald, who lacks charisma, screen presence and a script to render her character more than just an empty vessel. The most accurate representation of the film’s lack of competence is its multiple instances of confusing, somewhat vaguely explanatory blocks of on-screen text, my favorite of which reads, “How this work? dead and life are connected by what? emotions and energy? or, I’m ghost trap on a body in this world?”, and please note, this is verbatim, lack of coherent diction and all. I think this is supposed to be Heather’s journal, or possibly her poetry, but even then, what?
If the movie intends to be a creepy ghost story, there’s not much in the way of atmosphere or suspense. If it intends to be a character study, there’s not much going on in Heather’s noggin besides vague yearning, and curiosity about what’s in her own refrigerator – and if it intends to be a comedy, and I have my doubts about that, at least in this hilariously repetitive sequence, it succeeds. I don’t know what it intends to be besides a space-filler on a streaming service with a recognizable word in the title. This Echo lives in a vast, empty canyon devoid of all life.
Our Call: The hardest of hard passes. SKIP IT.
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