Echoes (2025)

A woman is haunted by strange sounds and traumatic images after she moves into a new apartment across from a strangely familiar woodland.

In Kuba Marczuk’s new short film, Echoes, he drops us right into the middle of a mystery where Agnes (Davey), along with the entire audience, is lost. She is wandering through some fairly typical English woodland, not knowing which direction to take, even though she lives in the middle of London and must know that by walking five minutes in any one direction she’ll eventually reach civilisation once again.

Agnes takes out her mobile phone, to at least place her in modern times, but it is of no help to her as she aimlessly wanders around the overgrown brush. Unable to get the focus right as he shows us the ominous spaces between the trees, Marczuk leads Agnes on past a small stream, out into a clearing, where some laughable special effects pass over her eyes and take control of her body. Whilst unconscious, Agnes has visions of the past, where she is running around the same woodland, lost in the same way as we all are, but in a scarlet dress with a dangerously low neckline.

With the infernal ringing of her phone bringing her back to the present, Agnes picks herself up, dusts herself off, and looks out over the skyline of the bustling city, which of course, was right in front of her this whole time. As she tries to settle herself back into the regularity of her life, her friend Amari (Daroy) gets that annoying ringtone pinging away again, as she attempts to bring Agnes back to the real world. However, with missed dinner and lunch dates becoming more frequent, Agnes finds herself continually drawn back to wanting to roam the woods in vintage clothing.

As you might have already guessed, nothing in Echoes makes a lick of sense. There’s no introduction to the setup or the scenario, there’s no dialogue for the first third of the film, which turns out to have been a bit of a blessing when the characters do eventually start speaking, and there’s never any explanation for anything that is happening on screen other than a strange glowing locket, which again remains mysterious and without any clarification whatsoever. There are hints of witchcraft or at least of the persecution by witch-hunters in the flashback scenes, but as these are again without dialogue, explanation, or any sort of sense, nothing is ever explicit in what is being shown to the viewer.

Trying instead to tell part of his story through sound design, Marczuk places whispering echoes across his visuals, mixed in with the noises of the city or the woodland (which if we remember are right next to each other), or that damned ringtone, which is meant to cut across worlds and through time to bring Agnes back to herself. All of this is meant to build tension and atmosphere, but instead just gets all muddled together in a large mess, which in all honesty is far more annoying and distracting to the audience than anything else. Similarly, the audio from phone calls is unintelligible, while the dialogue from actual in-person scenes can sometimes go so quiet that again we don’t know what is said. None of this really matters in the long run though, as the story makes so little sense that a few missed words could never change the outcome or feeling that the audience has.

The longer that Echoes goes on, the less it makes sense, as Amari joins Agnes in the flashback scenes, which look like they are supposed to be somewhere around Elizabethan times, and everything becomes one big jumbled mess. There is never any backstory to the locket, or to the magic that somehow manifests itself, and no conclusion is ever given to just what the actual fuzz was going on for the entire fifteen-minute runtime. Marczuk has instead thrown together a whole bunch of disparate storytelling mechanics and crumpled them all up into a paper ball, which even he can’t unravel again, and which in all good grace should have been thrown into the waste-paper bin to start with.

There is almost nothing to recommend Echoes to the viewer, save for maybe the committed performances of the two female leads. They are, however, working with absolutely nothing to go on and in the end find themselves a part of something that should have remained an echo, or a whisper, or a dream, instead of a film that goes nowhere and offers nothing to anyone.