V.hyenas from Australia but is set in the United States – between New York and Nevada – the miniseries in seven episodes Echoes, from 19 August on Netflix. Gina, an admired and successful writer, lives in the metropolis of culture and trends, while Leni, mother of a family who raises horses, lives on a ranch surrounded by mountains.
Michelle Monaghan is Gina and Leni McCleary in Echoes. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022
The two are identical twins, so similar that they are indistinguishable for everyone. They lead diametrically opposed lives and both seem happy and fulfilled. Neither seems to aspire to what the other has conquered. Or at least, these are the appearances. The truth unfolds into a melting mystery family drama and psychological thriller.
Echoes: the plot
Gina and Leni grew up, together with their older sister Claudia and their father Victor, in the classic house on the American prairie. They lost their mother – the only one who can tell them apart – as a child and the trauma exasperated the differences in their personalities: the first is very passionate, the second too calm.
Growing up, Gina gains a reputation as a troublemaker whose misdeeds are systematically covered up by her upright sister, until the rebel changes city and life to attend university. When Leni goes missing, panicking her husband Jack and daughter Mattie and unleashing the morbidity of fellow citizens, Gina returns, desperate at the idea of losing her twin, the beginning of a series of events that trigger disconcerting revelations.
Gina and Leni
Michelle Monaghan, a 46-year-old actress with a modeling background, grew up in Iowa on a farm just like Gina and Leni. In Echoes she plays both sisters, proving she can create two distinct characters for tone of voice, accent (at least in the original) and mannerisms.
The two seem perfectly well-knit, but Leni’s disappearance lets it shine through present frictions and old grudges, linked to a dangerous habit adopted by the two from an early age: that of exchanging roles. The existence of Gina and Leni in adulthood is marked by these exchangesfollowing a pact that allows Leni to taste life under the limelight of Gina, who lives in a luxury Manhattan apartment with her sophisticated psychotherapist partner.
In return, the latter can be satisfied by feeling like mother and wife and leading a simple life in contact with nature. But it is really possible for the two not to succumb to envy, jealousy and one exasperated possessiveness?
Michelle Monaghan and Matt Bomer in Echoes. Cr. Jackson Lee Davis / Netflix © 2022
Two women, three men
Another relevant issue concerns the ability to distinguish Gina from Leni, something that no one – neither the father nor the sister who have known them since they were born, nor the partners with whom they share intimacy – can do.
In Gina and Leni’s private lives are husbands Jack (Matt Bomer) and Charlie (Danel Sunjata). The first is a cowboy simple and of ancient values, the second a shrewd and worldly man. They are not the only men in the life of the two: Dylan (Jonathan Tucker), a local outsider, is the great love of Gina’s adolescence recently returned to the city, the only one potentially able to interfere in the very close bond of the two.
Under Jack’s stetson you can recognize the chiseled face of the 44 years old Matt Bomerlaunched on TV by the series White Collar with the role of the charismatic con man Neal Caffrey, while at the cinema he was one of the strippers of the wink Magic Mike. The fifty-year-old Danel Sunjata (Charlie) was one of the firemen of Rescue Me and boasts a solid television career. The true male star of Echoes he is, however, Dylan’s interpreter. Jonathan Tucker, forty years oldis one of the best and most underrated actors of his generation, boasts a long-lived and eclectic career (if you happen to, catch him up in In the valley of Elah, Black Donnellys or Kingdom).
A captivating mystery
Echoes it is a disturbing series in its investigating that mystery which is the connection between homozygous twins. Identical in appearance, superficially Gina and Leni are the reflection of each other in the mirror and yet they have radically different personalities. Despite this, they are able to deceive even loved ones by imitating each other, the fruit of one meticulous preparation for emulation. Sophisticated, suggestive and disturbing, the dynamics between the twins Gina and Leni they are arcane and alien to everyone else, including the viewer.
It is in the increasingly morbid and systematic digging of the Australian creator, screenwriter and producer Vanessa Gazy in the psyche and in the relationship of the protagonists that lies the charm of Echoes, more and more alienating as the narrative proceeds. The intricate feelings harbored for each other, rooted in rivalry and competition and exasperated by the accidents and traumas that dot their past, are clarified.
At the cinema, the Cronenbergian Inseparable he had admirably succeeded in investigating the twisted meanders of the morbid relationship of the two protagonists twins, with Echoes even the small screen insinuates itself into the secrets of this fascinating theme.
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