Crew
Director/Photography – Yam Laranas, Screenplay – Roy Iglesias & Yam Laranas, Producer – Roselle Monteverde-Leo, Music – Jesse Lucas, Visual Effects Supervisor – Fel Rodolfo, Production Design – Sammy Arranzamendez. Production Company – Mega Visions Films, Inc/Regal Entertainment, Inc.
Cast
Richard Gutierrez (Marvin), Jomari Yllana (Bert), Iza Calzado (Anna), Angel Locsin (Pinky), James Blanco (Jude), Ella Guevara (Lara), Lui Manansala (Marvin’s Mother)
Plot
Marvin has moved out of home and into an apartment in Manila. Soon after moving in, he is troubled by voices arguing and noises that keep him awake at night. Also living in the apartment building is Anna, who is beaten by her drunken husband Bert, a police officer. Anna goes to the neighbour Jude and begs him to look after her young daughter Lara to keep her out of Bert’s way when he returns home, but this only inflames Bert’s jealousies.
Asian ghost stories became huge in the 1990s/early 2000s, following Japanese successes such as Ring (1998) and Ju-on: The Grudge (2003). These produced numerous sequels, while most other countries around the region – South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Hong Kong and the Philippines – produced their own copies, before the most popular of these ended up being brought up for English-language remake in the US. (See Asian Horror). That influence can be found here with the Sadako-like character of a ghost woman with hair hanging across her face who appears at one point, although she is not the primary focus of the film.
The Echo creates a central location where all of the action takes place – an apartment building that seems to ooze with dank and gloom. Everywhere the walls seem to be reduced to a dirty brown, the lighting schemes turned green. There are water stains and grime on the walls, where even the wallpaper has faded into become one with the rest of the murk. The dankness of the apartment almost becomes another character in the film. You could point out similarities to the haunted apartment in Ring director Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002), which similarly had an abused mother and daughter trying to survive, although this is a very different story to that film in the way it plays out.
Yam Laranas uses the exuding dank of the apartment to evoke considerable atmosphere. Some of Laranas’s manifestations are unearthly – a scene where Richard Gutierrez is trying to sleep and blood drips down on his face and he turns around to find a woman hovering inches above his face in mid-air. Or of Angel Locsin and her encounters with the there again/gone again little girl (Ella Guevara) in the elevator. There is a brutal and nasty performance from Jomari Yllana as the abusive cop, none more so than the scene in the elevator with him taunting James Blanco about how much food he is carrying.
On the other hand, it is not that hard to guess the big surprise that The Echo has, particularly if one has been around and watched enough of the Conceptual Reversal Twist films of the 2000s. [PLOT SPOILERS] Here it becomes fairly obvious that the film is playing with our time sense from about the point that the young girl starts acting ghostly and we see door numbers ominously turning upside down.
The Echo (2008) was an English-language remake also directed by Yam Laranas, featuring Jesse Bradford as the new tenant, Iza Calzado as the wife and Kevin Durand as the abusive husband.
Yam Laranas has become the premiere Filipino horror director of the 00s. He subsequently went on to make the horror films Patient X (2009), The Road (2011), Abomination (2018), Aurora (2018), Nightshift (2020) and Rooftop (2022).
Trailer here