Stir of Echoes; The Astronaut's Wife (1999)

After a while, we barely need a fortune-teller to play connect-the-dots with these events. Stir of Echoes offers tricky fragmentation without mystery or mood; it's a mosaic of fear that grows less and less unsettling as it comes together. The movie is based on a 1958 novel by Richard Matheson, and the director, David Koepp (whose screenplays include Jurassic Park), can't do much to render material that might have seemed an exotically sinister head game four decades ago anything more than borderline banal now. In the end, the movie's vague title seems all too appropriate. It offers a stir of an echo of horror, rather than the genuine cathartic article.

The Astronaut's Wife, by contrast, is nothing but mood. The first-time director, Rand Ravich, envelops you in scenes of luxurious, foreboding quiet. My God, the movie is quiet: There are so many portentous pauses that, sitting in a theater on a Saturday afternoon, I was shushed by the person in front of me for the high-decibel crime of scribbling on my notepad. The film's strategy is ''subtle'' in an obvious way: The less that happens, the more we're meant to suck in our breath. We might have sucked in more of it, though, if there were greater novelty to the story of a Southern glamour-boy astronaut (Johnny Depp) who goes on a shuttle mission, gets lost in space for two enigmatic minutes, and then returns to earth, normal yet somehow changed. One night, after taking a corporate job in New York, he forcefully seduces his wife (Charlize Theron), she becomes pregnant, and ... well, what's growing in that womb is the big surprise.

Could it possibly be a demon space alien? I kept hoping that The Astronaut's Wife would turn into something more than a dutiful jumble of Rosemary's Baby, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Species II. The movie is far from incompetent; it simply has too few surprises to justify its indulgent atmosphere of malignant revelation. The actors do what they can. Depp, sporting blond highlights and an Elvis drawl, uses his stoic calm to hint at inhuman malice, and Charlize Theron offers her most vibrant performance yet. The suffering-pregnant-martyr role hasn't done much for any actress since Mia Farrow, but Theron, with her marvelously expressive baby face, knows how to wallow in pain without drowning the audience in it. If we're going to have actresses who look like supermodels, here's one, at least, with the talent to set off emotional depth charges. Stir of Echoes: C+ The Astronaut's Wife: C+