Echo Valley Review: A Deeply Committed Julianne Moore Leads Michael Pearce’s Twisted Crime Thriller
Echo Valley presents the familiar, age-old question: How far would you go as a mother to protect your only daughter? For Kate Garrett, played by Julianne Moore, it was an unthinkable thing that she was willing to do for her daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney). Before the mess happens, Kate’s life is already in shambles. She is still struggling to get over her recently deceased wife, Patty. Her stable needs serious repair work, and it costs a lot of money, which she doesn’t have. Her only solution is to go to her reluctant ex-husband, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), to write her a check.
Then, one day, Claire, who is a drug addict, comes home, telling her mum that she and her boyfriend Ryan (Edmund Donovan) got into an argument, with her ending up tossing his belongings. The belongings in question include a US$10,000 worth of drugs that Ryan desperately needs back because he owes it to the drug dealer, Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson). So, Claire returning home isn’t giving Kate any sense of joy for Kate other than causing more trouble.
It gets worse from there after Claire accidentally kills her boyfriend one night, and she doesn’t know what to do, leaving Kate to help her clean up the mess. That means she needs to dispose of the body somewhere, and for a while, everything goes well. The first half effectively sets up the tone, thanks to Michael Pearce’s assured direction working from HBO’s Mare of Easttown‘s Brad Ingelsby’s tight screenplay. It also helps that Julianne Moore’s engaging performance boosts the movie, and she is backed by a strong supporting cast, including Sydney Sweeney as Kate’s troubled daughter, Claire and Domhnall Gleeson as the sneaky Jackie.
The plot soon thickens as the movie enters the second half, and let’s just say nothing is what it seems. It may have been far-fetched, seeing the way Kate continues to address the problem that refuses to go away. It stretches believability, and yet, it still keeps me intrigued and invested in Kate’s plight, no matter how preposterous her situation is. Again, it was Moore who held everything together. She successfully captures her character’s grief and internal pain coping with the loss of her wife, and incredibly, she pulls it off with just a few visual references from minor flashbacks.
Even when the movie starts to show some cracks, particularly the mixed result within the story’s crime-thriller route filled with twists and turns, it manages to make up for most of its flaws by delving into the toxic mother-daughter relationship between Kate and Claire. Kate loves her problematic daughter, despite Claire continues to hurt her feelings and betrays her trust every now and then. Besides, she doesn’t have anyone left who’s closely related to her other than Claire.
The latter tends to be mean to her mother, especially when she becomes desperate and in need of something badly. No doubt Sweeney hits all the right notes carrying that kind of volatile young woman, easily resulting in one of her best performances to date, proving she has substantial acting chops if given the right opportunity, other than relying on her popular status as a sex symbol.
I notice Echo Valley has Ridley Scott enlisted as a co-producer under his Scott Free Productions banner, and his visual influence can be seen throughout the movie. As much as I appreciate Benjamin Kračun’s moody aesthetics to reflect the tumultuous, dread-inducing state from Kate’s perspective and everything that’s happening around her, I still can’t help but feel that the over-reliance on the murky lighting tends to be distracting after a while.
Echo Valley is currently streaming on Apple TV+.
