Sydney Sweeney makes her entrance in Echo Valley like an apparition in a horror movie. The movie’s main character, Kate Garretson (Julianne Moore), is the owner of the verdant Echo Valley Farm, where she boards horses and gives riding lessons to the privileged children of Chester County, Pennsylvania. She’s been making a go of things alone since the death of her wife six months earlier, and she’s out working in the stables when her dog suddenly starts barking and rushes outside. Someone’s clearly come onto the property while she was making her way through her morning chores, and she hurries over to the house and into its darkened interior to find that person rummaging through her fridge. In a different context, this discovery would be alarming, but Kate knows what we have yet to figure out — that the disheveled young woman in her kitchen isn’t an intruder, but her wayward daughter Claire. And yet, despite being very much flesh and blood, Claire does turn out to be, in her own way, a ghost.
She still looks like the child Kate raised and adores, the one whose photos adorn the walls of the house, but she’s been in the grips of addiction for years, a disorder that’s rendered her capable of behaving like a whole other terrifying person. Echo Valley, a thriller directed by Beast’s Michael Pearce, eventually introduces a more conventional villain in Jackie, a sneering drug dealer played by Domhnall Gleeson, but there’s only life in it when Claire is serving as a complicated secondary antagonist. Kate is in willful denial, smiling and doting and talking about community college while trying not to pay attention to the obvious signs that her daughter’s using, while Claire finds something contemptible in the way that her mother refuses to see her clearly as she is now. The two women are locked into this well-rehearsed dance of need and resentment, to which both actors bring something brittle and real. Moore almost vibrates with Kate’s overeager efforts to rewrite reality, while Sweeney homes in on Claire’s barely concealed calculations, the ways in which she dares her mother to say no, knowing that the woman would do anything to keep her around for as long as possible.
This bracing portrayal of a woman trying in vain to love someone into recovery is enfolded in a more conventional crime story that, despite Pearce’s efforts, never achieves the urgency it needs. Claire, who blows in and out of Kate’s life, turns up one night pleading for help and telling tales about an accident involving her shifty boyfriend Ryan (Edmund Donovan). Claire lies often and easily, but Kate helps her anyway, because she’d do anything for her daughter, and because the very act of being able to do something for Claire is its own terrible gift. From there, things unravel, betrayals occur, Gleeson tries unconvincingly to exude American menace, and Fiona Shaw appears as Kate’s ride-or-die bestie. Echo Valley feels in need of an additional twist, or one fewer — to either commit to being foremost a drama about addiction or to go harder into the suspense, rather than ending up an awkward hybrid of the two. In the second half of the film, Kate is positioned as an unlikely heroine out of her depth and still wrecked with grief as she tries to overcome a brutal foe, but it’s all rote. The most nail-biting scene in the movie involves not a local tough but Claire, desperate in withdrawal, threatening to kidnap and kill the family dog if Kate doesn’t give her some money.
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Echo Valley is, more than anything, emblematic of the strange limbo that Apple has chosen to occupy with its original films. It’s too expensive to just be streaming schlock, starring an Oscar winner and a rising name, and made with a handsomeness that, while a little overreliant on eye-of-God shots, features some arresting imagery. But it’s also not good enough to fall into the prestige category, to reach the audiences that turned, say, Anatomy of a Fall into a hit. On Netflix, a project equivalent to this would have cost $2 million and starred a just-familiar-enough face for a thumbnail on the home screen, and enough people might have tuned into it while on their phones to justify its existence on a budget spreadsheet. Echo Valley has more ambition, but to what end isn’t clear. Once upon a time, this kind of title would have popped up at a Landmark, playing to adults who wanted a classier night out at the movies but didn’t want to deal with subtitles. But that market has collapsed, and Echo Valley is, anyway, essentially going straight to streaming, where no one will know it exists. That’s not such a loss, and yet, for those scenes of Moore and Sweeney together, it’s worth stumbling onto — and to wonder what kind of star Sweeney, who can be so very good in the right role and so lost in the wrong one, will turn out to be.
