ECHO VALLEY Review: Julianne Moore, Sydney Sweeney in Tense, Suspenseful Thriller

In the real world, fireworks usually signal celebration, but in director Michael Pearce’s (Encounter, Beast) latest film, Echo Valley, a dramatic thriller co-starring Oscar winner Julianne Moore (The Room Next Door, May December, When You Finish Saving the World) and Sydney Sweeney (Immaculate, Anyone But You, Euphoria) as mother and daughter, respectively, fireworks represent something else altogether, collaboration, complicity, and ultimately, conspiracy.

 

They represent the expression of a mother’s “unconditional love,” a willingness to do everything and anything to save her daughter from a lengthy prison sentence or possibly something altogether worse. 

 

Before we get to that pivotal point in Echo Valley, Pearce, working from a taut, if twist-heavy script written by Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown, The Way Back, Run All Night), quietly introduces Kate (Julianne Moore), the struggling owner of a Southern Pennsylvania horse farm, as she awakens from a sleep troubled by the memories of her recently dead spouse. Feeding the horses and completing other farm-related chores, while rote and routine, provide Kate with the structure essential to contain, if not fully address, her grief. 

 

As Kate works alone on the farm, she also listens to voicemail messages left by her late wife. One such message includes Kate’s twenty-something daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), from an earlier unsuccessful marriage to a wealthy attorney, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan in a cameo). An adult, but far from embracing adult responsibilities, Claire has long struggled with substance abuse, including a mutually destructive relationship with Ryan Sinclair (Edmund Donovan), a drug addict like Claire and a low-level drug dealer employed by a mid-level distributor, Jackie Lawson (Domhnall Gleeson), with violent tendencies. 

 

When Claire, like so many other times, rushes to Kate, visibly distraught, with a story about another combustible argument with Ryan, one possibly involving physical abuse, Kate accepts Claire back into her life, setting aside past judgments or even hopes for Claire to return to the expensive rehab that’s left Kate practically bankrupt. However briefly, they fall into a time-tested routine, Kate offering comfort, food, and a bed for Claire, Claire responding with gratitude, even gentleness. 

 

That idyll, of course, doesn’t last. Claire can’t help succumbing to her self-destructive habits, suggesting Richard’s tough-love approach might have been preferable to Kate’s unconditional one, but Kate persists unchanged, as stubborn and unbending as Claire and the latter’s refusal to get the help she desperately needs. Ingelsby’s script also hints at another reason: Claire’s return allows Kate to temporarily set aside the unshakable, stalking grief created by the loss of Kate's wife. 

 

All that, however, serves as backstory for the first of several increasingly implausible, ultimately ludicrous plot turns, beginning with Claire’s reappearance after a mother-daughter fight that also signals a long standing pattern of manipulation (Claire’s) and submission (Kate’s). When the fight doesn’t go according to Claire’s plans, she returns, covered in blood (not her own), and with a skillfully wrapped body in the backseat of her car, forcing Kate into a life-altering, potentially tragic decision. 

 

From there, Echo Valley could have gone in any number of directions, including one in which Kate and Claire, re-bonded through Kate’s decision to help her daughter, face the emotional, personal, and potentially criminal consequences, but Pearce and Ingelsby decided on another, far less emotionally and dramatically satisfying direction, one filled with twists, each new one more egregious than the last, until the final moments when Kate, the audience’s sympathetic point-of-view character gets a rushed ending that feels neither well-deserved nor, more importantly, well-earned by everything that preceded it.

 

The script also sidelines Claire for long stretches, especially during the second half and the third act, an error that undermines not just the central conflict, but also the central question posed by Kate’s dilemma, “How far would a mother go to protect their daughter?”, for an underwritten, borderline illogical sequence involving Kate and an unwelcome Jackie, the latter fueled by the simplest of emotions, greed while the former (Kate) conjures up a complex plan of action to handle the latest obstacle to returning to a relatively well-ordered, uneventful life.

 

Even with its disappointing second-half stumbles, Echo Valley manages to keep the audience on the other side of the digital engaged, if not always interested, in Kate and Claire’s individual and collective plights, the result of Pearce’s relatively assured direction, especially his control of tone, mood, and atmosphere, and top-tier, layered performances from Moore, still one of the finest performers of her (or any other) generation, and a never-better, de-glammed Sydney.

 

Flaws and all, their powerfully raw scenes as mother and daughter make Echo Valley a worthy, worthwhile watch.