‘Echo Valley’ Review: Julianne Moore Plays A Mother Who Should Care Less

AppleTV+’s Echo Valley has a lot going for it. Julianne Moore anchors the film, with supporting turns from Sydney Sweeney and Domhnall Gleeson, all operating at an unlikable-to-loathsome pitch that is effective if unpleasant. The script, from Mare of Easttown’s Brad Ingelsby, finds drug abuse and other crimes in picturesque rural Pennsylvania. Fiona Shaw is there, in her niche as the wise friend you call when things get tough. Kyle MacLachlan shows up for a scene, but hey — it’s always good to see him! There’s a dance party set to Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” and… honestly, that’s probably the highlight right there. It’s always good to hear some Robyn, especially in an otherwise trauma-slogging movie dragged out for nearly two-and-a-half hours.

There may be a lot going for Echo Valley, but there’s not actually a lot there. The unthrilling thriller about the lengths a woman will go to protect her daughter is a confounding muddle of other, clearer stories. The first half of the movie offers a portrait of the fraught relationship that Kate (Moore) has with her drug-addict daughter Claire (Sweeney), who swans back to her mother’s quiet horse ranch anytime she gets in trouble. If you read the synopsis and expect the movie to hit the ground running with Claire arriving home covered in blood, then hold your own horses because Echo Valley is going to make you wait for the plot to start plotting!

Most movies luxuriate in the long set-up because establishing the characters will matter, but Echo Valley is unique because nothing you learn about Kate or Claire holds any weight as the movie progresses. Kate, still grieving the loss of her wife, only emerges from her stupor when her daughter demands her attention. Her impressive feat of wit later in the film isn’t hinted at in the series of poor decisions she makes in handling her life and her daughter at the start. Meanwhile, Claire may be an addict, but the movie very much wants you to know that she’s mostly just a bad person, not sick. Rather than giving Kate any redeeming qualities, it just throws horrible people in her path to force your sympathy, while she rolls over to them.

So yes, eventually — after several comings and goings — Claire does arrive home as promised, covered in blood and with a body in her car. She tells Kate that she argued with her drug-dealing boyfriend, he got physical, and she defended herself with a rock, and Kate does the necessary plot thing of disposing of the body rather than calling the police to report this case of self-defense. Claire stays home, just long enough to make her mom think she’s grateful, and then she takes off again — and that’s when things finally start to get interesting, almost an hour into the movie.

The back half concerns Domhnall Gleeson’s Jackie, a bigger-time drug dealer Claire and her boyfriend owed money to, blackmailing Kate because he knows what she did with the body. In the ’90s, that would have been the whole movie. There’d have been a tight fifteen minutes at the start establishing Kate’s problems with Claire and the body, and the rest of the movie would be a tense cat-and-mouse between Kate and the sorta-sexy bad guy (played by Billy Zane, duh) who moves into her barn and watches over her until she pays up. She’d outwit him, of course, but that would be expected because the movie hadn’t spent over an hour proving how gullible she is. Here, Gleeson gets the short end of the stick, showing up just in time for the movie to finally do something, but too late to save it. He’s too slimy to be problematically alluring, and there’s no space in the script left after all the mommy-daughter drama to make him any sort of mastermind or threat. He can’t be, if a pushover like Kate has any hope of overcoming him.

To the film’s credit, there are several worthwhile twists in the narrative. Not that this is a mystery with grand reveals, mind you. A mystery provokes questions in pursuit of the truth, and Echo Valley is about lies. The characters lie, and the movie lies, and you think you know what’s going on until you’re given a new version of events. You never have a reason to ask questions — the movie simply hands you a different answer. As a thriller, it’s perfunctory, pivoting from every point of potential stress lest Kate have to, like, do something about it. As a drama, it’s half-finished; I could forgive the pathetic stakes if the movie were truly about Kate and Claire’s relationship, but when that falls by the wayside it falls hard and with no resolution. What’s left, then, is Kate’s personal journey out of her haze of grief and back into the real world. There is a repeated visual motif of Kate’s feet sliding out of bed, stylishly shot by director Michael Pearce (Encounter). Some days, she hesitates before finally placing them on the floor, as if they might break. Some days, she pulls them back up, opting not to get out of bed at all. By the end of the movie, her feet land with a purpose, an eagerness we haven’t seen before.

So foot-fans, rejoice! Over two hours of death and destruction and Domhnall Gleeson’s stringy hair just for the enormous pay-off of knowing that somebody’s feet seem a bit happier.

Echo Valley is now available to stream on AppleTV+ after a limited theatrical opening.