Echo Valley is one of those movies that start out as one thing and become something else. But it’s also a rarer type of movie that becomes a weirder third thing, abandoning most of what worked about it along the way. Very good performances and quasi-prestige gloss give the impression of something more sophisticated, but this is ultimately a rote rural thriller that has bitten off more than it’s interested in chewing.
And that’s a shame, since so many of the constituent parts are so good, not least the marquee names of Julianne Moore (Sirens) and Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria), who deserve to star in the addiction drama that Echo Valley pretends to be for a while. But for whatever reason, British director Michael Pearce, rather oddly helming a movie set in the verdant countryside of Chester County, Pennsylvania, abandons this dynamic early, and Sweeney is scarcely seen again. What remains is a more conventional thriller with a twist too many – or perhaps too few – to really feel memorable or especially interesting.
Moore plays Kate, the owner of Echo Valley Farm, where she boards horses and gives riding lessons to children much more wealthy than she is following a divorce from her ex-husband Richard (Kyle MacLachlan, Fallout), who turns up for one scene and is the only character with any measurable sense, and the recent death of her wife, Patty. Most of Kate’s – and a lot of Richard’s – money has been wasted on repeated attempts to get her addict daughter Claire (Sweeney) sober, a process she has determinedly rejected, resulting in an estrangement that, for Kate, has festered like an open wound.
Until she returns, blowing onto the farm like a strung-out ghoul and immediately demanding money to clear the debts of her junkie boyfriend, Ryan (Edmund Donovan, Tell Me Lies), who is in deep with local dealer Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson, playing a villain again so soon after Fountain of Youth). This is where Echo Valley is at its best, because the relationship between Kate and Claire is fascinatingly deranged; Kate, having lost everyone else in her life and living in constant fear of losing her daughter for good, is willing to put up with virtually anything to “look after” Claire, while Claire herself is a habitual liar prone to outbursts of violence and demented threats. The movie’s most effective moment comes when she snarls her intention to kidnap and abandon the family dog if Kate doesn’t give her money.
Sydney Sweeney in Echo Valley | Image via Apple TV+
You won’t like either of these characters – Kate can’t see the forest for the trees, and Claire doesn’t care about anyone but herself – which is entirely the point. The depth of pain required to treat your own mother this way, and for that mistreatment to be desperately overlooked in turn, is what gives the story its emotional texture, and Moore and Sweeney both sell it with everything they have. But the movie quickly shifts gears, speeding away from addiction drama territory and becoming instead a crime thriller, with Kate crossing a line to protect Claire that ends up backfiring on her considerably.
From here, Sweeney disappears, and Kate is instead left to share scenes with Jackie and her pal Leslie (Fiona Shaw, Bad Sisters), as the terms of the narrative are once again amended. Both Gleeson and Shaw are very good here, but the setup is too rote to feel very engaging, and the “twists”, such as they are, are signposted a mile away. A potentially tense and claustrophobic arrangement between Kate and Jackie doesn’t yield half as much drama as it might have, and Leslie appears infrequently enough to feel like something of a fairy godmother whenever she does, wielding a wand that cooks up narrative contrivance.
Echo Valley is streaming on Apple TV+, which it wants to remind you of at every opportunity through sometimes egregious product placement, but it ends up feeling like the quintessential idea of a streaming movie eventually thanks to the way it unravels and can’t decide which crowd to play to. There’s a better movie locked away inside this one, I think, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever see it.