After surviving Sisters’ Feud, I thought that I was safe from Netflix’s barrage of atrocious family dramas until the new year. What’s arriving when humanity hits 2025? Well, the new Harlan Coben adaptation, which, from the looks of it, has a missing family member and the words “suspense” and “thriller” attached to it, thereby adding to the streaming platform’s ever-expanding catalogue of crime thrillers centered around rich families or close-knit communities. I started off 2024 with Coben’s Fool Me Once. Then there was The Accident. After that, I came across We Were Kings. And I lost track of time, and maybe some of my brain cells, while enduring Blood Legacy, The Perfect Couple, and Territory. That’s why I made the mistake of thinking that, surely, Netflix didn’t have another one of these abominations in their vault. I was wrong, because the streaming giant has delivered an Egyptian remake of Who Killed Sara?, which is titled Echoes of the Past.
Sadeer Massoud’s Echoes of the Past opens with Nadia, Yehia (Nadia’s brother), Ali (Nadia’s boyfriend), Mona (Yehia’s love interest and Ali’s sister), and Sherif going on an underwater diving expedition. It’s evident that there’s some kind of animosity between the whole group, especially between Nadia and Mona, but they choose to ignore all that and plunge into the ocean. A few minutes later, Nadia’s diving cylinder begins to malfunction, and, even though she is a few feet away from the surface, she dies. Yassin and Saswan, Mona and Ali’s wealthy parents, force Yehia to take the fall for this “accident,” or else it’ll hurt the influential family’s political ambitions and also ruin the futures of Mona, Ali, and the couple’s youngest child, Layla. Yehia obviously rejects this proposal as he wants justice for Nadia. When Yassin and Saswan promise him that he’ll be compensated dearly for spending one year in jail, Yehia accepts the offer. However, one year turns into 15 due to Yassin’s manipulation of the judiciary. Eventually, when Yehia is released from prison, he has only one thing on his mind: revenge.
I don’t know about the original, but Echoes of the Past has its heart in the right place because it wants to tell a story about classism and how the poor always end up paying for the misdeeds of the rich even if they are linked by the bond of friendship. It’s yet another warning to the middle class and the working class to stay wary of the upper class, because we don’t enjoy the same level of impunity as them. Hence, the law will treat us more harshly than it treats them, even if we are the most innocent creatures on this planet. That said, do I need 8 episodes to learn this lesson? No, I don’t. An email or a short film would’ve been more than enough. On top of that, this well-intentioned message that the show wants to convey to its target audience is kind of lost in the mess created by all the red herrings and plot twists. If you watch the first episode and the last episode, you technically won’t be missing out on anything; that’s how bad the writing is in this show! By the time the writers decide to reveal the identity of the killer, the intrigue has simply washed away, and all you’re left with is exhaustion.
Props to those in charge of the visual storytelling of Echoes of the Past (I don’t know the names because the crew isn’t properly credited on IMDb, and I can’t read Egyptian Arabic) because the show is constantly dynamic and chaotic. There are several split diopter shots throughout the series’ runtime. There’s copious use of cross dissolves. The lighting is pretty imaginative. At one point, Yehia encounters a hired gun, and the whole scene looks like it has jumped out of the John Wick franchise. The rest of the show looks nothing like that scene. That’s not a critique, though. All that visual trickery actually kept me from hitting the “close window” button. There’s a surprising amount of action sequences in the show, by the way, and they are unintentionally hilarious. I may sound insensitive, but even Nadia’s death is unintentionally hilarious. I’m not sure what Sadeer and his team were trying to achieve, but the way the character just starts flailing around because of a malfunctioning tube, when she is only a few feet away from the surface, is just ridiculous. The same thing happened with the inflatable killer bouncing castle in The Accident. I understand that it’s supposed to look devastating, but the final product is simply too funny. Also, that’s precisely the reason why the final episode doesn’t work; there’s just too much going on to take it seriously. Only Ekta Kapoor could be proud of the editing in that season finale.
Before talking about the cast, I have to clarify two things. Firstly, the actors haven’t been properly credited on IMDb, and I don’t know how to read Egyptian Arabic. So, I’m trusting TMDB here with the names. Secondly, I’m sure that all the actors involved are quite talented, because there are glimpses of their acting prowess throughout the show, but they’ve all been done dirty by the writing and the direction. Hence, most of my critiques regarding the performance are not solely targeted at the actors. Okay, with that disclaimer in place, I’ll say that Asser Yassin is the most consistent in terms of tone. The same can be said about Rakeen Saad, but she is made to do a lot of “nuanced acting” towards the end, which doesn’t exactly land. Sherif Salama, Tamer Nabil, and Huda El Mufti are alright. Saba Mubarak seems perpetually confused. Mahmoud Hemida is really wooden, especially when he is de-aged. Sherine Reda is extremely cartoonish, which is also accentuated by the de-aging effects. Mohamed Tharwat and Mohamed Alaa seem to be in the wrong show. They are just too odd to be a part of this overly serious revenge drama. As usual, I won’t say anything critical about the children’s section of the cast because they’re too young to be judged. I just hope that they keep getting good work, improve their skill set, and become the best actors that Egypt has to offer.
Here’s the big question: Do I or do I not recommend giving Echoes of the Past a watch? To be honest, it’s a pretty bad show. That said, it has the potential to enter the “so bad that it’s good” category because of its unique mixture of chaotic visuals and stupid narrative. It didn’t do it for me, because the whole ordeal became very boring after a certain point. But maybe you’ll end up enjoying it because of its messiness. Given how I started this review by bringing up Sisters’ Feud, I’ll mention it again since that’s the only Netflix show that I’ve enjoyed despite its horrendous storytelling. There were at least 10 plot twists in the first 25 minutes of the first episode of that show, and it didn’t let up that energy for the next 19 episodes. And even though I could see that it was flawed, I couldn’t hide how impressed I was by its audacity. So, Netflix, if you are reading this and you want to make more of these family-crime-drama-mystery-thrillers in the year 2025, make ‘em like Sisters’ Feud or don’t make them at all.
