Constantly on the move, always trying new things, Sydney Sweeney’s advance on the Oscars probably won’t be helped by Echo Valley – she’s just not in it enough – but it won’t be hindered either. And she’s surrounded by the sort of actor the Academy loves.
What is it though, this Echo Valley? Julianne Moore and Fiona Shaw are in it, so there’s an expectation of a certain sort of high-tone emotional drama, which is exactly what we get… at first. Moore plays the mother to an abjectly drug addicted daughter (Sweeney). Kate is at her wit’s end over Claire’s regular relapses and yet she continues to enable her daughter because she is a soft touch and in a bit of a state herself – she’s recently just lost the love of her life, the woman she left her husband for. And her horse farm is making a massive loss. And ex husband Richard (Kyle MacLachlan) is getting sick of bailing out both the farm and his daughter – he’s got a new family of his own.
Count up them issues. Echo Valley starts off looking like a Sundance movie and sets us up for the expectation of lots of breastbeating. And then it swerves into dark thriller territory, when the endlessly plausible Claire pulls off a stunt her mother wasn’t expecting and Kate winds up in the middle of a lake in a boat disposing of a dead body. And then local drug heavy Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson) turns up and things go from bad to worse.
The breastbeating starts up again when Kate’s old friend Leslie (Shaw) arrives on the scene to offer emotional support but then director Michael Pearce and writer Brad Inglesby take us back into thriller territory again, yanking our chains for all their worth as they play peekaboo with the genre.
The film is sold on Sweeney’s name to a large extent. And while she’s absolutely great as usual (couldn’t we have just given her the Oscar for Reality and been done with it?) she’s not in it that much. Around the halfway mark she passes the baton to Gleeson, who runs with it in a performance revealing that floppy haired romantically inclined young men are not all he’s good at.
Watch it for Gleeson, a malevolent and properly hissable presence. Watch it for Moore once again pressing the buttons as a woman on the edge of emotional collapse. For Shaw’s scant but effective screen minutes. Not for MacLachlan, who’s not in it enough. Or for Sweeney, come to that, though the scenes she shares with Moore are tough nuggets of (often weepy) goodness.
You could describe it as a cautionary tale about the perils of helicopter parenting. Writer Inglesby wrote the Liam Neeson actioner Run All Night and that Kate Winslet TV show Mare of Easttown and if those are twin poles – action and emotion – both are well represented here, though director Michael Pearce (of Beast and Encounter fame) struggles to keep the energy up when things get too talky.
It’s one of those films that doesn’t quite hit the spot and it’s probably the loss of pace that’s the reason why. Jed Kurzel’s score does what a Jed Kurzel score does – keeps us on edge with discordant clanks. But it isn’t quite enough to hold the interest until a knotty little twist towards the end comes along and saves the film from a watery grave of its own. It’s a good ending worth hanging on for, though the suspicion lingers that in the old days this would have been a tight B movie and someone in the back office would have demanded a cut of 20 minutes.
Echo Valley – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
