Directed By Michael Pearce

Starring – Julianne Moore, Sydney Sweeney, Domhnall Gleeson

The Plot – Kate (Moore) is dealing with a personal tragedy while owning and training horses in Echo Valley, an isolated and picturesque place, when her troubled daughter, Claire (Sweeney), arrives at her doorstep, frightened, trembling and covered in someone else’s blood.

Rated R for adult language throughout, some violence and drug material.

Echo Valley — Official Trailer | Apple TV+

POSITIVES

Apple TV continues to offer a variety of genre-expanding engagements, with “Echo Valley” being perhaps its most psychologically subversive offering of its entire cinematic library, as a result of the complexity assembled with tapping into something as tenderly uncomfortable as toxic relationships between parents and the children that constantly keep them up at night with fear. From the word go with “Echo Valley”, we’re immediately shown everything that we need to know about the unsettling bond between Kate and Claire that constantly enables the behavior, and while the characters leave more to be desired on account of Kate’s naivety and Claire’s ruthlessly abrasive onslaughts of insults to a still emotionally-reeling mother, it’s an angle rarely captured for cinematic depiction, with Pearce enabling a refreshing honesty within the portrayals of his characters that responsibly conveys that none of them are innocent, despite the elder enacting a tender vulnerability that is effortless to empathize with. Pearce’s ambiance for atmosphere goes a long way in maintaining the interests of the audience throughout a story that doesn’t always reward their patience, both with the psychological stitching in editing of memories in the background of those events transpiring in the foreground of the movie’s narrative, but also underlining dread and anxiety that spring naturally with intimate framings that allow us to see the terror that’s held within a character’s eyes. Outside of this, the film is acted quite exceptionally from a stellar ensemble, particularly Moore and Sweeney, who dominate most of the spectrum with differing portrayals that ground these characters in humanity, despite their actions not always being familiar to the audience watching from beyond. Moore plays tenderly frail almost better than anyone in Hollywood, and as a result there’s a distancing uneasiness to Kate that keeps her from being emotionally invested in the present, and while Sweeney pales immensely in screentime to her Academy Award winning co-star, she unlocks a devastatingly deconstructive side to her demeanor that constantly feels like the proverbial bull in the China shop to any environment she comes into contact with. Together, the two have incredibly thorough amounts of lived-in chemistry with one another that goes a longer way towards articulating their rocky histories with one another than the unsubtle depths of the movie’s heavy-handed screenplay, and while it’s absolutely no surprise that they’re the single best part of this movie’s experience, it’s remarkable the kind of fiery intensity and radiance that they supplant to the small screen, proving the admirable dedication that each has to any opportunity to showcase their impressive emotional range to such vulnerably complex characters.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, that’s where the pleasantries end, as “Echo Valley” collapses under the decisions of its own creative will, with a confrontational screenplay with no shortage of compromising actions to continuously test the patience of its audience. For starters, the story actually isn’t as subversively stimulating as originally gauged during the opening moments, with spoon-fed dialogue and unnatural conversations that frequently spell out the intention to the audience, without any semblance of subtlety for the interpretation. While not all audiences are created equal, as a result of lacking focus or thematic connection to the material, it never feels beneficial when a movie’s characters are forced to go out of their way directly explaining things that we just experienced, regardless of the increasing stakes and scope of the conflict, and considering I never had difficulties capably interpreting the movie’s intentions, it enacts a grinding halt to the movie’s pacing, each time it stops to contextualize the matters that aren’t as profound as intended, making the audience feel like the unofficial third party during scenes involving two characters discussing the past actions of these people. Likewise, the metaphorical essence of the movie’s imagery is meant to mirror Kate’s own internalized anguish with grief and connective longing, but is focused upon far too often to do anything other than completely obliterate the nobility of the intention, instead beating us over the head with bluntness that had me audibly screaming for the movie to get to the point. On top of this, the script comes to a crossroads in the middle of the story, where it chooses the less compelling route, rather than the one they’ve focused its first fifty minutes on, and not only does it involve Claire disappearing for nearly the rest of the film, but also takes the movie’s momentum right out the window with her, sacrificing the movie’s most fascinating relationship for a home invasion angle with more holes in its devices than Swiss cheese. Part of the frustration here certainly lends itself to the dependency on mysteries established within the storytelling, rather than the transparency of the family dynamic that has previously dominated the storytelling, with convoluted actions and sequencing among these characters that grows tediously disconnecting the longer the movie persists, but the bigger issue is that the mysteries themselves involve these melodramatic twists that are effortlessly telegraphed, as a result of the way the script constantly envelopes matters in this air of ambiguity that annihilates subtlety, leaving it all the more obvious just where the movie is heading and who is responsible, on account that the ensemble of characters involved are quite limited in their compact numbers. This is especially the case with the movie’s ending, with far too many of the scattered pieces left unguarded, so that the audience can see the outcome from a mile away. Because Pearce directs this summarized sequence as an uncovered revelation of sorts, it gives the movie no rewarding payoffs to the stacked conflicts that come to overwhelm Kate, with a closing final shot that intends to represent a lot, but in reality doesn’t give me the confidence to think that anything groundbreaking has changed at all within these characters.

OVERALL
“Echo Valley” is an honestly bittersweet and anxious portrayal about the limits that an emotionally grieving mother will go to protect her drug-addicted daughter, with spine-tingling turns from Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney bringing humbling humanity to their respective portrayals. While the film treads water during its opening act, with Michael Pearce’s disquieting direction casting a spell on its audience, it rapidly sinks on account of the heaviness from a lack of subtleties within its thematic impulses that spoon-feeds even the most attentively distant of moviegoers, deducing it to being just another digestible streaming outlet meant to elicit noise during the folding of loads of laundry.

My Grade: 5.3 or D