Michael Pearce’s Echo Valley, as written by Brad Ingelsby, tries to bring together a host of interlocking narratives, and to limited success. At the center of the story is a fraught mother-daughter relationship that could itself have been enough to sustain the film. Kate (Julianne Moore) is a widow who can’t see past the fog of her grief over losing her wife to take care of herself or the horse farm she once ran with her ex-husband, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan). Her daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), is a long-term addict and chaos generator who seems to only show up when she needs money or a place to crash.
The script creates a potentially engaging dynamic by tangling his characters in a chain of co-dependency. We see Kate visiting Richard, a wealthy lawyer exasperated by his ex’s neediness, to ask for money to keep up the farm. After admonishing her to get her life together and to stop letting Claire bleed her dry, he writes a check. Kate then turns around and does the same thing to Claire, lightly finger-wagging and then ultimately giving her daughter what she wants. The only person willing to talk sense to Kate is Leslie (Fiona Shaw), a tough-minded friend conveniently introduced to provide assistance during the film’s bait-and-switch climax.
But rather than exploring this aspect of the plot further, Echo Valley turns into a crime story. In a twist on a familiar noir trope, Kate discovers that Claire accidentally threw away a bag holding $10,000 in drugs. The drugs’ owner, Jackie, a lank-haired dealer played with subtly manipulative verve by Domhnall Gleeson, comes looking for restitution. Kate, with her horses and tastefully appointed Chester County home, appears to him like a good target for blackmail.
Again, rather than playing out this narrative string, Ingelsby throws another trope into the mix by having Claire appear in the middle of the night claiming to have accidentally killed her addict boyfriend, Ryan (Edmund Donovan). The ever-enabling Kate rushes out to dump the wrapped-up corpse at the bottom of a lake, thinking this will end the cycle of calamity. It doesn’t.
Gleeson and Shaw drain every bit of juice from relatively stock characters, but aside from these two performances, very little about the murkily shot Echo Valley generates much in the way of thrills or emotion. A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.
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