Director: Maria Tran, Takashi Hara
Echo 8 drops a professional killer into a fractured mental landscape where dream and duty keep bleeding into each other.
What is Echo 8 about?
Working inside a shadowy underground outfit, an assassin known for precision starts losing the line between missions and memory. Recurring visions pull her back into a nightmare she can't fully place, and the pattern grows harder to ignore with every new job. Her latest assignment asks her to eliminate a woman in mourning, a target who should be a stranger. Instead, small details in the woman's life start matching pieces of the assassin's own buried past, and the closer she gets to completing the hit, the more the mission starts to resemble something personal rather than professional. Directed by Maria Tran and Takashi Hara, the film leans into hand-to-hand combat and tight, kinetic set pieces built around its lead performer's martial arts background. Australia's Echo 8 keeps its scope compact, favoring choreography and atmosphere over spectacle, and uses its dream sequences to fracture the timeline rather than pad the runtime.
Cast & crew
Maria Tran, who co-directs, also stars as the assassin at the center of the story, working alongside Takashi Hara, Gabrielle Chan, David Vuong, Mike Leeder, and Nova Onas in an ensemble built around close-quarters action rather than dialogue-heavy scenes.
Context & significance
Echo 8 is a 2024 Australian action thriller running 96 minutes, part of a wave of independently produced genre films that pair a lean budget with a stunt-trained lead. Its dual-director setup, with Tran handling performance and Hara co-directing, reflects a growing trend of actor-filmmakers shaping their own vehicles. The production also draws on a wider circle of regional genre talent, including producer-actor Mike Leeder, whose credits stretch across Hong Kong and Australian action cinema, giving the film a cross-continental crew despite its modest scale.
Where & how to watch
Echo 8 is available to watch on K-Time with a Persian dub track, alongside the platform's Farsi-first interface built for the Iranian diaspora. The film page itself is free to browse; watching the film requires logging into a K-Time account.