Director: Michael Pearce
Writer: Brad Inglesby
Stars: Julianne Moore, Sydney Sweeney, Domhnall Gleeson
Synopsis: Kate is dealing with a personal tragedy while owning and training horses in Echo Valley, an isolated and picturesque place, when her daughter, Claire, arrives at her doorstep, frightened, trembling and covered in someone else’s blood.
The conceit of Michael Pearce’s Echo Valley promises a riveting psychological thriller between mother, Kate (Julianne Moore), and daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), as the two carry a fractured relationship, but not as heated as when Kate is with her ex-husband, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), who has now wiped his hands clean of his past life and lets Kate take care of their daughter. We learn that Claire has been in and out of rehab, and promises to her mother that she is finally clean, when the two reunite for the first time in a long time.
Things seem to be going relatively well, until, one night, Claire arrives at Kate’s door covered in blood, and demands that she helps her out. I won’t reveal more specific detail, as Pearce and screenwriter Brad Inglesby essentially hope that you watch this movie without having seen a piece of footage or know the bare minimum. This is a thriller which thrives on the audience not knowing what will come next, for its reveals to act like a shock to the system, especially its final needle-drop that supposedly ties the entire story together. The only problem is that, at every turn, Pearce and Inglesby make some of the most ridiculous screenwriting decisions that constantly shift the movie from point of interest to the next, without much thought behind the machinations of its story.
It starts out as a quiet, almost poetic drama in whichKate still reels from the loss of her wife (the reason for the divorce with Richard was her coming out) and has trouble keeping her ranch afloat. When Claire arrives in the picture, the movie becomes something else entirely, one that feels like a reconnection picture, as Kate attempts to help her daughter out in getting back on her feet, until Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson) comes into the picture, and the movie once again shifts gears. It’s at that point where it began to lose my grip, particularly during a confrontation between Kate and Claire, with Sweeney being especially terrible in moments of raw dramatic power.
We’re supposed to fear for Kate’s life, at the grasp of Claire, who is still clearly using, but each occasion of terror, where Jed Kurzel’s music creates bludgeoning impact, doesn’t feel at all tangible, either through Sweeney trying way too hard to sell strong emotions that don’t need to be exaggerated this way, or with a defenselessMoore having little to no chemistry with the actress playing her daughter. It doesn’t work, and the movie sadly never recovers from that scene, since most of the emotional beats that follow are built around it.
Moore does try her best on several occasions, especially when pitted against Gleeson’s Jackie, but he gives one of the worst performances of his career. It creates a wobbly sense of tension when one veteran actor is terrific, or at least tries to imbue her thinly written character with as much humanity and emotional attachment as possible, while the other completely misunderstands the assignment, even during the final scene, where all is revealed. None of it works, and very little actively feels earned.
The only saving grace the film offers in its 104-minute runtime is fleeting appearances from Fiona Shaw, as Les, one of Kate’s closest friends. Whenever the two are paired together, the film lights up, especially during Shaw’s perfect delivery of “Grief: There is no roadmap for that shit.” She brings a much-needed emotional anchor for a movie that’s in desperate need of something, anything, for the audience to cling to. Their relationship works, and even though Shaw sparsely appears, her presence is always most welcome.
When Echo Valley eventually culminates in a scene where the audience realizes they were tricked and everything is revealed, every scene of importance we saw before feels pitifully unearned, as if all the narrative and thematic threads Pearce wanted to present led to nowhere intriguing. Cinematographer Benjamin Kračun certainly tries to develop an arresting visual language for the movie, but when the story never engages its audience to a real point of interest, most of what we get is a series of striking images with little to no meaning while many A-list actors deliver some of the flimsiest performances of her career.
Thank God for Fiona Shaw, because if it weren’t for her, I would’ve turned it off ages ago.
