Echo Valley is the most frustrating kind of movie: the kind that’s almost good. It’s relatively well-made, well-acted, well-paced. And yet it’s never particularly scary or morally complex, so even though all the pieces are there, the film ends up being merely serviceable. You keep imagining the great, gripping neo-noir it could have been.
After all, it stars Julianne Moore, who can sell us just about anything. She plays a woman named Kate, who lives alone in an L.L. Bean dream of a farmhouse, deep in the woods of southern Pennsylvania. Kate’s wife recently died, and she distracts herself with day-to-day ranch hand duties and coaching horse riding lessons.
Then her estranged adult daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney), who has been in and out of drug treatment, knocks on the door. She has run away from her dirtbag boyfriend, and she wants to turn her life around and reconnect with Kate.
Of course, it’s only a matter of time before the boyfriend resurfaces, Claire relapses, and she vanishes again after a violent outburst. But the next time Claire comes back to the house, it’s (of course) on a dark and stormy night, she’s covered in blood, and her boyfriend’s body is wrapped in a tarp in the backseat of the car.
I must admit that I’m a sucker for plots like this, and there is a queasy thrill in watching it tick off items from the trusty thriller plot point checklist: the isolated location, the desperate woman, the rich ex-husband, the vengeful drug dealer, the corpse that’s dumped into a lake and may not stay submerged for long. Kate is desperate to keep her daughter safe, but Claire is operating on her own twisted logic, and Echo Valley builds inexorably to a series of twists and double-crosses.
So why doesn’t it totally work? I think it’s because it does feel like it’s running down a checklist. Movies like this need to make us feel like we’re trapped along with the characters and their dubious decisions, that we’re being led against our wills into a moral morass. But it doesn’t really have any surprises: When the plot takes a left turn, we’re already leaning into it.
What keeps the movie alive are the performances, not only by Moore but by Domhnall Gleeson and Fiona Shaw in two surprisingly rich supporting roles. Gleeson is the criminal who comes looking for money that Claire owes him, and he’s both smooth and menacing. Shaw is Kate’s old friend, trying to ease her through grief, and she creates a totally believable, lived-in character in just a few scenes. (I should also mention that Kyle MacLahlan has a minutes-long cameo near the beginning as Claire’s father and is never seen again.)
Echo Valley was written by Brad Ingelsby, best known for the acclaimed HBO miniseries Mare of Easttown. That was another story about a strange crime and a desperate mother, but it took its characters into richer, darker territory. This one is the sort that you might put on some rainy afternoon and not mind too much. I doubt that’s what the filmmakers were going for, but being a perfectly OK streaming diversion is better than nothing. My, how low the bar is.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101,” Friday evenings at 6:30 here on KPBX.