5 days ago
Echo Valley: Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney star in the plot-twist thriller of the year
There are few plot devices more pleasing than a surprise whose shock value mellows into pure karmic satisfaction, and Echo Valley delivers the toe-wriggler of the year. This pensive, riveting Apple TV+ thriller performs a sort of narrative jiu-jitsu on its audience – using the weight of an early, straightforward twist as leverage in a second, more elaborate one, which cumulatively leaves the viewer breathless and giddy on the mat.
Directed by Britain's Michael Pearce (of Beast and Encounter) and written by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Inglesby, Echo Valley would make a persuasive answer to the question 'in a Taken-like crisis, what if it fell to the mum, rather than the dad, to sort everything out?'
By that I don't mean that this is a film in which Julianne Moore rampages around rural Pennsylvania cracking Albanian skulls. Rather, Moore's stoic single mother, horse trainer Kate Garrett, uses a particularly maternal set of skills – foresight, forbearance, meticulous planning, sound character judgement, and an ability to call in the perfect favour from her friendship circle at just the right moment – to extricate her troubled adult daughter from a hellish predicament.
Said daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) is a drug addict, and her habit has yoked her to two undesirable men. One is her boyfriend and fellow user Ryan (Edmund Donovan); the other is the couple's reptilian dealer Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson, resplendently hideous), to whom the pair find themselves $10,000 in debt.
With no hope of recouping the sum from Claire, Jackie tails the girl to her mother's shiningly bucolic and seemingly successful farm – which he decides to treat, via threats of violence and ruin, as an enormous, hay-strewn ATM. To his eyes, this woman clearly has money to spare.
We know better, however: in a dry yet tender cameo, Kyle MacLachlan pops up as the successful former husband still shovelling four-figure cheques into this sun-dappled money pit which has come to stand for everything his ex holds dear.
Echo Valley opens with half an hour of relatively low-key scene-setting drama that also delicately sketches in Kate's grief for her late female partner: enough to invest the more suspenseful remainder with enough emotional weight to make it really smack. As Claire, who in bomb terms is less shell than site, the often glamorous Sweeney has been pointedly cast against type. But Claire's complex mother-daughter relationship with Kate – strained well beyond breaking point, yet still determinedly, impossibly unsnapped – is deftly handled by both actresses.
In a brilliantly underplayed early scene, the two go swimming at an idyllic local lake, which later serves as a nexus for various murky developments. Kate watches her girl playing happily with some younger children, and Moore's unspoken anguish – if this is her now, why can't it be her always? – vibrates silently through the moment.
Inglesby wittily repurposes such modern plot-wreckers as mobile phone tracking and instant messaging into real dramatic assets, while as a director, Pearce is a savvy stylist who knows exactly when to rein things in: imagine Jacques Audiard with a cricket conscience perched on his shoulder whose only job is to say 'steady on'. The outrageous yet methodical nature of Kate's rescue plan for her daughter is, therefore, an ideal fit for him. Echo Valley is nothing like a conventionally air-punchy film, but you can't help but cheer the whole enterprise on.
