echoes netflix movie review

Late August seems like the perfect time for a bit of tawdry, twisty escapism on Netflix, something to rival the success of shows like “ Clickbait ” or “ Pieces of Her .” And the cast of the latest entry in the Netflix thriller mini-series catalog is more than up to the challenge of a project like “Echoes.” At first, its premise holds promise, amplified by a fun, flinty dual performance from Michelle Monaghan , an underrated actress for most of his career (seriously, go check out “ Trucker ” and “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” now). Who doesn’t want to watch Monaghan play twins in a goofy mystery?

Sadly, the potential of “Echoes” starts to drain before the premiere is even over as it gets goofier and goofier in a way that’s not entertaining but frustrating. And then it makes the opposite mistake, over-explaining everything about its story through dull flashbacks and interrogation scenes. For four episodes, “Echoes” defiantly makes almost no sense, and not just in a traditional thriller/mystery nature but because of shallow writing and choppy editing. And then, almost as if the writers know they need to pull the reins on this runaway horse, the show unfolds the most expository episode of TV I’ve seen in years, explaining it all in the fifth chapter, before limping along for two more. By the end, it’s impossible to care about any of these people or what has happened to them, other than to hope the talented cast puts it behind them quickly.

Monaghan plays twins Leni and Gina, living very different city/country lives when the show opens. Gina is in Los Angeles with her therapist husband Charlie ( Daniel Sunjata , tragically miscast), and she’s carved out a successful writing career. Leni stayed back in Virginia and married her high school sweetheart Jack ( Matt Bomer ). The two had a daughter named Mattie (Gable Swanlund), and Leni seems well-liked in her rural community while her identical twin enjoys the high life in Hollywood. Well, sorta.

“Echoes” opens with Gina’s disappearance, sending Leni home to figure out what happened to her sister. The main secret (in a show full of them) that drives the narrative is that Gina and Leni have been switching places every year on their birthday, allowing one to live the mirror life of the other. They’re kind of both married to Charlie/Jack and kind of both mother to Mattie. Yes, it’s weird. It’s also a great hook because it should not only give Leni dueling motives of finding Gina while also keeping everyone around them unaware of the ruse but allow us to question her own sanity given what the sisters have been doing for years. Most importantly, what could Gina have run from that Leni wouldn’t know about already? Changing identities requires complete honesty, right?

And yet creator Vanessa Gazy almost immediately muddies the Virginia water with a half-dozen other secrets. There is the odd threat of horse thieves in the hills, flashbacks to a burning church, something nefarious happening in a bathtub—Gina/Leni is not just trying to figure out what happened to her sister, she is assaulted by trauma and deceit everywhere she goes. “Echoes” gets downright silly with revelations, ending every other scene with a confusing shock. It gets so you need a flowchart to keep track of the sisters and their secrets. At times, it almost feels like major chunks of the narrative are missing, like a reader who accidentally skipped a chapter in a book. I was reminded of the famous story around “ The Snowman ” about not filming the entire screenplay. “Echoes” has that kind of choppy rhythm that’s more annoying than mysterious.

It’s a shame because, again, some of the cast is up for the challenge of a twisty soap. Monaghan settles into her role(s) nicely, struggling at first to distinguish the sisters (although that’s kind of on purpose to support the narrative) but eventually carving out distinct identities for Leni & Gina. Bomer is always solid, although woefully underutilized here, and the same could be said for Jonathan Tucker , who gives the show a much-needed sense of danger when he appears as Gina’s boyfriend, but then the series wastes his efforts on the aforementioned “here’s what’s going on” episode.

The main problem with “Echoes” is the most common TV problem of the current era—it doesn’t have the story to support a series. We can put up with silly characters like this in a 100-minute movie (maybe) but stretching out this kind of unrealistic behavior to seven episodes simply breaks the potential entertainment value by highlighting how unbelievable everyone is forced to be just to get to the next end credits. I started watching “Echoes” with excitement over what secrets these twins might be keeping not only from everyone in their lives but also each other. But there’s way too little fun to be had in this show that seems content to mimic superior thrillers in a way that sounds like, well, you know.

Whole series screened for review .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

Michelle Monaghan as Leni and Gina
Matt Bomer as Jack
Jonathan Tucker as Dylan
Daniel Sunjata as Charlie
Ali Stroker as Claudia
Karen Robinson as Sheriff Louise
Celia Weston as Georgia
Vanessa Gazy

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Echoes’ On Netflix, Where Identical Twins Regularly Switch Lives — Until One Of Them Goes Missing

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You ever watch a scene or scenes on a show and rewind to try to figure out just what happened and/or what was said? You tend to do it for one of two reasons: Either the moment was so shocking that you have to take it all in again or the moment was so confusing, you need to decipher exactly what went on. We rewound the last scene of the first episode of Echoes and watched it three times. Sad to say, it wasn’t because we were enthralled with it.

ECHOES : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman running through an upscale neighborhood.

The Gist: Gina McCleary (Michelle Monaghan), an author in LA, is very close to her identical twin sister Leni (also Monaghan), who is a horse farmer in Virginia. She calls her sister all the time for advice, and they leave each other messages in an online journal. But she’s getting worried that her usually-responsive sister isn’t returning her calls.

She eventually gets a phone call from Leni’s husband Jack Beck (Matt Bomer) that Leni has gone missing. Without a second thought, Gina flies to her hometown to see where she can help. It’s more than just wanting to help, though; the two of them are so connected that she wouldn’t know what to do if Leni was no longer around.

Gina is as pushy as Leni is relaxed, so when a day’s search ends for the night, she leans heavily on Sheriff Louise Floss (Karen Robinson) to keep looking. The folksy sheriff, who was a deputy when Gina left town under extreme circumstances, knows what she’s been through and relates the story to deputy Paula Martinez (Rosanny Zayas).

Gina goes to the house where she grew up, where her father Victor (Michael O’Neill) lives with her younger sister Claudia (Ali Stoker), who completely resents Gina for leaving. Gina notes that Jack has hired a nanny, Natasha (Maddie Nichols), and moved her niece Mattie (Gable Swanlund) to a different room. In addition, body parts from old creepy dolls her late mother gave her and Leni are missing.

As she goes looking for Leni in some of their old haunts from when they were kids, including a local cave, we find out that Gina is actually Leni; the two regularly switch lives. It seems that the real Gina has run off for good, as a note tells Leni that she can choose either of their lives going forward.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Echoes plays like an extremely dumb version of Orphan Black.

Our Take: There were lots of reasons why the first episode of Echoes , created and written by Vanessa Gazy, grated on us. The first was the wooden acting by lots of people who have been excellent in other projects. Monaghan is especially melodramatic as we hear her lyrically write to her sister in this online journal that makes no sense to us. Do only the two of them see it? Or is this public? Don’t they call and text each other all the time? Why communicate in this clunky way?

But she’s not the only one whose performance is stunningly bad. Bomer has an accent that goes in and out, and the usually reliable O’Neill seems to have only slightly modified his usual cantankerous federal agent persona into a cantankerous rancher character. And Robinson’s folksy Sheriff Floss might be a bit too folksy for the tone of this series. It doesn’t help that all of these fine actors are saddled with lines that are either just plain bad or delves in too much exposition. For instance, Gina’s husband Charlie (Daniel Sunjata) says that Jack “feels like he brings your LA drama to his quiet Virginia life,” which just told us where the two sisters live. Oof.

All of this would be fine if the very idea the show is built on made any sense. Why on God’s green earth would these women switch lives so often, which means they spent however much time they’re 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’re left scratching our heads; we still weren’t clear which sister Monaghan was currently playing and which left. Her voice over at the end that said, “OK, Gina, welcome back to being Leni, to being me… so I can find out just what you did here… to both of us,” we had to listen to that line 3 times to even come close to figuring out who was who and what Leni is looking to do.

Sex and Skin: None, at least in the first episode.

Parting Shot: See above; Leni comes back to her house as herself, braids in place and self-inflicted bruise on her head. She hugs Jack and Mattie, but her drawl-inflected voice over has her thinking about just what the hell kind of chaos Gina inflicted when she was being Leni for the past year.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Robinson as Sheriff Floss; yes, she may be too folksy at times, but she’s taking the goofiness of the role and running with it.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Charlie, a therapist, asks Gina over the phone if she’s seeing things through a lens of anxiety, Gina replies, “No I’m seeing things through a lens of shit is fucked up.”

Will you stream or skip the twisty #EchoesNetflix on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) August 22, 2022

Our Call: SKIP IT. Echoes is without question one of the most messy and confusing shows we’ve seen in awhile, and there really seems to be nothing for a viewer to grab onto that would tempt them to move to the second episode after the first is over.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com , VanityFair.com , Fast Company and elsewhere.

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Limited Series – Echoes

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Double the Michelle Monaghan should be a winning proposition, but Echoes is a resounding misfire whose promise grows fainter with each silly twist.

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‘echoes’ review: trashy, twisted netflix mystery ultimately fizzles.

Michelle Monaghan plays twins with seemingly very different personalities in Netflix's new seven-episode limited-series mystery.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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Netflix Echoes recap guide: All 7 episodes explained

By fansided | aug 19, 2022.

Echoes. Michelle Monaghan as Gina McCleary in episode 101 of Echoes. Cr. Jackson Lee Davis/Netflix © 2022

Echoes is the newest Netflix original mystery-thriller limited series that will have the entire world sitting on the edge of their seat looking for clues. The series stars Michelle Monaghan as twins Leni and Gina, who switch lives to seemingly the point of no return.

When one of the twin sisters goes missing, the other is left to play both parts. For years, Leni and Gina have shared two lives, two homes, and two husbands, but Leni’s mysterious disappearance knocks down the first domino that unravels the tangled secrets of their past and present.

In her absence from the small town of Mt. Echo, a steadfast detective looks to put the messy pieces of Leni and Gina’s lives together. However, the twins have made sure to leave some key pieces of the puzzle out of reach, making for a gripping and shocking binge-watch.

Netflix Echoes recap guide

Add Echoes to your Netflix watchlist!

The following episode guide contains heavy SPOILERS from the limited series, so make sure to read along as you watch. We’re breaking down all seven episodes of the new miniseries, so if you have questions or want to learn more about the show, dive right in!

Netflix Echoes episode 1 recap: Home

Echoes episode 1 introduces us to Gina McCleary (Michelle Monaghan), an in-demand publisher working in Los Angeles, happily married to her doting therapist husband Charlie (Daniel Sunjata) and in near constant contact with her identical twin sister, Leni (also Monaghan).

At least, she normally talks to Leni every single day, until recently. Leni has been off the grid for 36 hours and her husband, Jack (Matt Bomer), calls Gina to tell her the worst possible news one could get about their sibling: Leni is officially missing and Jack fears she’s been taken. Gina immediately hops on a plane to Mt. Echo, Virginia where Jack and Leni live on a peaceful and picturesque horse farm with their daughter Mattie (Gable Swanlund).

On the plane ride over, Gina continues searching for her sister anyway she can, leaving her voicemails until her inbox is full and checking Leni’s online diary, which hasn’t been updated in days.

Upon arriving, Gina immediately finds lots of things amiss at Leni’s, like her best friend, Meg, not helping with the search party and a young, blond pretty babysitter named Natasha (Maddie Nichols) looking after Mattie. She also notices that Mattie’s room has been moved down the hall since the last time she was there.

Outside, Gina catches up with Jack, who isn’t all that happy to see her there. He wants to know what Leni has told her. The last time they talked, Leni mentioned breaking in their new colt. That’s odd. Jack says they got the new colt over a month ago. It’s clear something else is amiss between Jack and Leni, but he’s not saying what just yet.

There’s also tension between Gina and the Mt. Echo sheriff, Louise Floss (Karen Robinson). It’s clear there isn’t much love lost between them and Floss alludes to Gina having gotten into some trouble when she was a teenager living in Mt. Echo with her sister and family. Floss mentions that the bolts to the stables were cut and the horses released.

There is evidence there was a least one intruder on the premises with footprints matching size 13 shoes. The stable office was also ransacked, though Jack says nothing was stolen. Leni might have been kidnapped or she could have tried rounding the horses back up and gotten lost or hurt.

Afterward, Floss fills her deputy, Paula Martinez (Rosanny Zayas), in on the McCleary family gossip. According to the town rumor mill, Gina is the troubled one, not Leni, though she does mention that there is “more than one story,” which will be a theme throughout the season. Floss says there is a good deal of silence around the McCleary family, always has been.

On the way off the property, they notice a man getting into his pick-up truck and Floss notes that she doesn’t recall seeing him at the search party. “Let’s just remember that vehicle, shall we?”

Gina stays with her dad Victor (Michael O’Neill) and other sister, Claudia (Ali Stroker). If you thought the tension between Gina and Floss was bad, it’s even worse between her and Claudia. Claudia is a wheelchair-user and I kind of get the vibe that something might have happened during the girls’ childhood that led to her being that way. Even though their dad begs for civility, Claudia ends up leaving the dinner table in a huff.

Afterward, we get an idea of what Floss meant when she said the McCleary family was surrounded by sadness. A flashback shows young Leni and Gina with their mom, who appears to have died from cancer at an early age.

Gina goes into Leni’s old bedroom and finds a doll that appears to hold some meaning to her, except its been torn apart. She confronts Claudia and her dad to find out who did it. They mention that Jack sometimes goes into that bedroom and so does Mattie, and Natasha for that matter. Gina decides to go stay at the Riverside, a motel in town, despite her father’s protests. “Something’s wrong here.”

She relays the weirdness of the situation to Charlie. He agrees that there’s a lot of weird stuff going on, like Jack hiring a babysitter with a belly piercing, moving Mattie’s room down the hall, the fact Meg is no longer speaking to Leni and now the doll, and Leni didn’t tell Gina anything about it.

But things are about to get even weirder! After calling Charlie from her car, Gina looks at the doll again and gets a sneaking suspicion related to a tree in the front yard with a pair of swings. She goes digging into the tree hollow and finds one of the doll’s missing arms with a small cross charm tied around it. Why that tree? What significance does it hold?

Once she’s at the hotel, Gina leaves another message for Leni. Since her voicemail is full, Gina records herself talking and sends an audio message through Leni’s online blog. She watches another one of Leni’s video diaries where she talks about missing Gina, wanting to give her a birthday present, but before then it’s back to working 12-hour days because they have a “lot to get ready for.” Gina hones in on Leni mentioning “12-hour work days” for some reason and then goes to take a bath.

Before she can get into the water, we see another flashback. It seems like Gina witnessed something horrific involving a bathtub drowning when she was younger.

The next day, Floss starts organizing another day of searching for Leni when a horse returns with human blood on its side. Jack and Gina ride horses into the woods to look for answers and find a dead horse, shot in the head. Even stranger is that the horse had its microchip removed. Jack reveals this horse isn’t one of theirs, but they board her.

Floss can still sense something is off with this horse. The microchip was removed a while ago and Jack gets weird and touchy when she asks about why that could be and whether he has paperwork for this horse. It sounds like they were boarding a stolen horse and that Jack knew it was stolen. Floss advises him to find the paperwork since then they can track down its owners… which, if it is stolen, could pose a problem.

Floss asks Gina to take a walk with her after and presents her theory that Jack might be caught up in some criminal activity. Gina argues that Leni would never let Jack get involved in something like that.

Gina and Jack discuss what’s been happening and Gina mentions the video diary she saw and the 12-hour work day thing. Jack says that’s not true. Leni hasn’t been working 12-hour days, she’s barely been around at all. She’s in and out at all hours, doing god knows what. That’s why Jack hired Natasha. He needed the help.

Spiraling, Gina reaches out to Charlie for help. But she can’t make sense of what Leni was thinking. We see some flashbacks again to when Leni and Gina were kids and how they always seemed attached at the hip. Gina realizes something related to an old photo of her with her sister in front of a waterfall and heads out to that spot, but not before Jack catches her in the hallway and starts kissing her. Gina reminds him that she’s Gina, not Leni, but he doesn’t seem to care.

She pushes him off of her and goes to the waterfall, stepping into a cavern hidden behind it. Something happened there when the girls were kids. A series of flashbacks shows that Gina and Leni often switched places, as kids, as teens and… as adults. They’ve certainly got a twisted relationship.

We learn that Gina and Leni have been switching places on their birthday every year so the “Gina” we’ve been following throughout this entire episode is actually Leni . Gina is the missing twin. Leni has spent the last year in Los Angeles pretending to be Gina and Gina has been in Mt. Echo pretending to be Leni. They planned to meet again in a few days to switch again on their annual birthday vacation, this year in Lake Tahoe.

So, Leni is the one who goes into the cavern and finds that Gina has left her several mysterious clues, including more doll parts, clothes and the book she wrote called Echoes . Inside, Gina wrote a message for Leni, “Happy Birthday. You get both lives. Choose.”

Leni is thoroughly confused by this message and no closer to figuring out what her sister wants or is planning. But now she’s going to have to play both parts and the first thing she needs to do is bring Leni home so people stop looking for her. Leni ditches her Gina clothes, puts her hair in her trademark side braid and starts heading back toward the farm, stopping to knock herself out with a big rock so she can make it look like she really has been lost and injured in the woods for days.

Written by Maddy Lennon

‘Echoes’ Review: Netflix Thriller Series Is Confusing, Ridiculous and Totally Addicting

Michelle Monaghan plays identical twins who have spent their lives switching places in the limited series

In most ways, “Echoes” is just another wacky Netflix mystery show: questionably written, filled with recognizable B-listers, and filmed in such a way that if you didn’t already know it was a Netflix show, you’d be able to figure it out pretty quick. But in time, starting about halfway through the seven-episode limited series, this particular wacky Netflix mystery show becomes something a whole lot weirder and a whole lot more interesting than most that have come before.

Michelle Monaghan plays identical twins Gina and Leni, who have spent their entire lives switching places with total ease. Gina may have moved to Hollywood and lost the soft country twang she grew up with, but she can slip back into it and Leni can slip out of it so easily that it’s almost as if there is no difference between them anymore, which is sort of the point. Leni is married to hunky cowboy Jack (Matt Bomer), while Gina, a writer, is married to hunky therapist Charlie (Daniel Sunjata). And then there’s hunky Dylan (Jonathan Tucker), the boy from the past, who is apparently nothing but trouble if you ask anyone else in town. Gina and Leni switch lives every year on their birthday — husbands, homes, jobs, clothes, everything — and while there’s a whole heap of secrets they’re hiding from the world, they know everything there is to know about each other. Or so they thought.

Mere weeks before they were supposed to switch on their next birthday, “Gina” is called back to her hometown because “Leni” has gone missing, and her absence reveals a whole world of puzzles that “Gina” has to solve. That premise twists and contorts throughout the season, weaving a convoluted mystery with the entire concept of personhood. What makes a person a person? How does a woman separate her personhood from motherhood? How might a frustrated sheriff (Karen Robinson) prosecute a crime if it’s near impossible to tell which of two absolutely identical twins committed said crime? Even before the show finally reveals exactly why this story is so interesting, there are plenty of interesting questions to ask, and plenty of new things to think about for all the millennials who grew up on “The Parent Trap” and Mary-Kate and Ashley movies. Maybe having an identical twin actually sucks?

Speaking of pop culture’s most famous twins, there’s an aspect to this show that made me imagine a beautiful world in which the Olsen twins hadn’t ever retired, and instead had evolved in their careers to bring us darker versions of their twin antics. This is “It Takes Two” meets “Single White Female,” with an ending that legitimately made me gasp and then Google whether or not there might be a second season on the way (it’s currently classified as a miniseries). It takes twins switching places taken to a whole new, deeply questionable, totally ridiculous and yet completely compelling place, to the point where I wasn’t just thinking about how there’s only one Michelle Monaghan every time she was on screen. (I was still thinking about that, but I wasn’t only thinking about that.) And no, the show doesn’t exactly dive into the murky waters around having sex with a person who thinks you’re someone else, but that was certainly something I was thinking about, too.

“Schitt’s Creek” actress Karen Robinson plays an excellent and suitably annoyed sheriff who’s just trying to figure out what on earth is going on, and while she feels at first like a foil to root against, I found myself on Team Sheriff more often than not. Somebody here deserves to be arrested, even if it’s never clear who, and sometimes it’s not even clear what crime Floss is out to solve. The lives of Gina, Leni, their sister Claudia (Ali Stroker) and their dad Victor (Michael O’Neill) are endlessly complicated and riddled with PTSD. Their mother died of cancer, Gina had a miscarriage, one of the twins caused the accident that landed Claudia in a wheelchair, and the church burned down one time, among many, many other things. It’s pure soap opera in the best way, and I think I could probably watch a daily soap opera with this exact same concept, with a few major pacing changes.

The only real problem here is that the show takes a little too long to reveal just how soapy and fun the story actually is. The first episode is slow and confusing, and the next few episodes don’t answer enough of the many, many questions any normal person would have about two women sharing their entire lives to really want to keep going. Then, Episode 5 turns the tables in such a way that I couldn’t have hit play on Episodes 6 and 7 any faster, and then it was annoying that there were only seven episodes. When your season is that short, you can’t wait until more than halfway through to explain what’s actually going on. Then again, I’m now excited to rewatch the entire thing with the knowledge gained in Episode 5, so I’m not that mad about it.

I am slightly mad on behalf of Sarah Michelle Gellar, who played identical twins with messy lives in the classic canceled CW show “Ringer.” This is a much better, much more cleanly CGI’d version of that show, though for some reason I feel like I’m still going to be thinking about “Ringer” long after “Echoes” has left my brain. I will definitely, however, be thinking about “Echoes” much longer than any other Netflix mystery miniseries I’ve ever seen, so that’s definitely something.

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Karen Robinson and Michelle Monaghan in Echoes (2022)

Leni and Gina are identical twins who have secretly swapped their lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults, but one of the sisters goes missing and everything i... Read all Leni and Gina are identical twins who have secretly swapped their lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults, but one of the sisters goes missing and everything in their perfectly schemed world turns into chaos. Leni and Gina are identical twins who have secretly swapped their lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults, but one of the sisters goes missing and everything in their perfectly schemed world turns into chaos.

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August 19, 2022 (United States)
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‘Echoes,’ Starring Michelle Monaghan as Warring Twins, Is a Soap Tailor-Made for Netflix Binging: TV Review

By Caroline Framke

Caroline Framke

Chief TV Critic

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Echoes. Michelle Monaghan as Gina and Leni McCleary in episode 101 of Echoes. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022

It’s all too easy to understand the appeal of a show like “ Echoes ” to a streaming service like Netflix. From creator Vanessa Gazy and showrunners Quinton Peeples and Brian Yorkey (“13 Reasons Why”), “Echoes” feels like “Firefly Lane” and “Behind Her Eyes” collided to create a melodrama as deeply strange as it is quickly ingestible. Its seven episodes fly by fast enough to distract from the fact that they only barely make sense. It’s twisty, but repetitive, making sure every plot point gets several scenes to marinate. All the while, Michelle Monaghan throws herself into the challenge of portraying twins with the delirious freedom that the show’s hyperbolic framework allows. Once, “Echoes” might have been a made-for-TV movie; now, it’s a limited series built to set up camp in Netflix’s Top 10 until another version of the same (maybe Emily Deschanel’s upcoming “Devil in Ohio”?) knocks it out.

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Leaning into uneasy thriller vibes with an eerie score and impressively unreliable narrators, “Echoes” bobs and weaves between the twin perspectives of Leni, the seemingly milder-mannered twin, and Gina, the so-called bad seed. Leni favors a side braid, precision, and a heavy Southern drawl; Gina prefers loose waves, smoky eyeliner, and a life independent of her sister’s. Even for twins, their abnormal closeness as children leads to an astonishing gambit as adults. Every year on their birthday, the two switch lives, not only to walk in each other’s shoes, but to share custody of Gina’s L.A. therapist husband, Charlie (Daniel Sunjata); Leni’s Virginia rancher husband, Jack (Matt Bomer); and daughter, Mattie (Gable Swanlund). “The switch,” as they call it, is unnerving enough as a concept alone, but “Echoes” takes it a step further by having the moment itself unfold in a ritual that comes across as a both religious and psychosexual experience, complete with more candles than should ever be burning outside a lesbian love scene circa 1994. Whether as small kids (played by Hazel and Ginger Mason), teenagers (Madison and Victoria Abbott), or adults, Leni and Gina’s connection is so intense it’s practically supernatural, giving “Echoes” an edge of strangeness that perplexes as much as it intrigues.

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Every so often, the show makes overtures toward saying something capital-i Important about what it means to be a woman, sister, and/or mother. These moments feel largely out of place amidst the wild turns that otherwise make up “Echoes,” but are undeniably necessary for making the twins more understandable outside of their bond. What ends up being more effective, though, is when the show embraces its histrionic tendencies as the TV equivalent of a paperback thriller you might pick up at an airport and blaze through before your flight lands. Actors like Ali Stroker (as the twins’ resentful sister) and Karen Robinson (as their hometown’s suspicious sheriff) have a field day by diving headfirst into the show’s drama, delivering each line to register from a mile away. And while Monaghan does her best to bring a wounded dignity to both twins, she’s at her best when conveying their more unhinged breakdowns as the double act begins to fall apart.

The most interesting aspect of “Echoes” — or at least it’s most unexpected, given how much it otherwise tries and fails to create a wholly original mystery — is the fact that it initially puts the viewer inside the perspective of the ostensibly more trustworthy twin before flipping its own switch. By design, the series makes it impossible to know which twin to believe at any given moment. By the (rather disappointing) end, neither “Echoes” nor Gina and Leni themselves seem to understand who’s even who anymore, anyway. At that point, though, it almost doesn’t matter. “Echoes” was built for an audience that just needs a night’s entertainment that’s intriguing enough to throw back like a shot of whiskey before moving on to the next round.

“Echoes” premieres Friday, August 19 on Netflix.

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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.

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.

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.

Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a Thirst for Twists Aurora Amidon

IMAGES

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COMMENTS

Echoes movie review & film summary (2022) | Roger Ebert
“Echoes” opens with Gina’s disappearance, sending Leni home to figure out what happened to her sister. The main secret (in a show full of them) that drives the narrative is that Gina and Leni have been switching places every year on their birthday, allowing one to live the mirror life of the other.
'Echoes' Netflix Review: Stream It Or Skip It? - Decider
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Echoes’ On Netflix, Where Identical Twins Regularly Switch Lives — Until One Of Them Goes Missing
Echoes: Limited Series - Rotten Tomatoes
Limited Series – Echoes. 2022 Drama Mystery & Thriller CTA List. 22% Tomatometer 23 Reviews 42% Popcornmeter 250+ Ratings. Identical twins Leni and Gina lead double lives, but their ...
'Echoes' Review: Michelle Monaghan in Twisty Netflix Mystery
Michelle Monaghan plays twins with seemingly very different personalities in Netflix's twisty new seven-episode mystery limited series, 'Echoes.
Echoes (miniseries) - Wikipedia
The miniseries is a mystery thriller about identical twins Leni and Gina, who share a dangerous secret. They have secretly swapped lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults where they share two homes, two husbands, and a child.
Netflix Echoes recap guide: All 7 episodes explained
Echoes is the newest Netflix original mystery-thriller limited series that will have the entire world sitting on the edge of their seat looking for clues. The series stars Michelle Monaghan as ...
Echoes Review: Netflix Series Is Ridiculous and Addicting
‘Echoes’ Review: Netflix Thriller Series Is Confusing, Ridiculous and Totally Addicting. Michelle Monaghan plays identical twins who have spent their lives switching places in the limited...
Echoes (TV Mini Series 2022) - IMDb
Leni and Gina are identical twins who have secretly swapped their lives since they were children, culminating in a double life as adults, but one of the sisters goes missing and everything in their perfectly schemed world turns into chaos. Creator. Vanessa Gazy. Stars. Michelle Monaghan.
Echoes Review: Netflix Thriller Stars Michelle Monaghan as Twins
Leaning into uneasy thriller vibes with an eerie score and impressively unreliable narrators, “Echoes” bobs and weaves between the twin perspectives of Leni, the seemingly milder-mannered twin ...
Echoes Review: A Fascinating Story Gets Undermined by a ...
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 ...