Grieving widow Kate Garrett (Julianne Moore) hides her struggles. She’s hard up financially, and relies on the dwindling generosity of her ex-husband, Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), for funds to repair her disintegrating horse farm, the titular Echo Valley Farm; she listens to old voicemail recordings from her dead wife, bottling up the tears as long as she can before angrily stamping them out in her chores; and she admirably bears her difficult relationship with her drug-addicted daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney) with unconditional love, even when, at the start of the film, she returns home after an apparent bender in need of money herself. Michael Pearce’s noirish melodrama, Echo Valley, follows a lineage of films about mothers who will stop at nothing to protect their children. This film, with its focus on Kate’s geographic isolation, lack of spousal relationship, and her intervention in the problematic relationships her daughter has with dangerous men, most readily evokes Max Ophuls’ 1948 classic, The Reckless Moment. In fact, the similarities in Echo Valley are occasionally so close that the evocation teeters on the edge of imitation, right down to the gruesome details that comprise both films’ first major turning points: a dead body at the bottom of the nearby lake, and blunt force head trauma, to name just two.
In Ophuls’ film, Joan Bennett’s one-woman quest to cover up the accidental death of the older man courting her teenage daughter serves as a symbol for the treachery of women’s post-war emancipation. Can this prim and proper housewife, with her husband away for work and not wanting to disturb him, juggle the banalities and tragedies of motherhood by herself? Pearce and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby (Mare of Easttown) ask the same question of Kate. The answer is that the hell of motherhood lies not just in the literal danger of murder and cover-ups, but also, unlike in Ophuls’ film, in the fact that when it comes to the health of her relationship with Claire, all her hard work might be for nothing.
Claire’s sudden reappearance seems like a chance to start over. She’s dumped her “fuck face” boyfriend, Ryan (Edmund Donovan), after throwing all his possessions off a bridge. There are talks (mostly one-sided by Kate) of community college and creative writing classes. Ryan returns one night, bloody and angry, to let Claire know that, along with all his possessions, she also threw out a substantial amount of drugs that he has to answer for. They storm off into the night, and Claire returns a few days later, strung out but in one piece. But the cycle begins again. Kate and Claire go to the beach to relax, where we witness that, for her history of fuck-ups, Claire is great with kids; and that Kate can’t admit to a young woman she meets by the shore that motherhood actually gets harder, reassuring the terrified stranger with all the subtlety of a thunderclap that, actually, “everyday is a gift.” One wonders whether the film had to try so hard to reiterate the simple fact that no form of motherhood is easy in such a contrived moment of irony.
Then again, Kate is not one to admit defeat, either in her quest to keep up appearances (at least to Claire) or in her quest to protect her daughter. When drug dealer Jackie (a stringy, twitchy Domhnall Gleeson, excellent in a role that ultimately undercuts his genuine menace) shows up with Ryan demanding the money for the lost drugs, Claire has to explain to Kate all the sordid details of what she’s been up to. Later, she sets off with them on a supposed camping trip, only to return, once again, a few days later — this time with Ryan’s dead body in the back seat of the car. Kate, the ever-devoted mother, takes care of it. From this point, there are several more narrative detours yet to come (everything just described happens in only the first half hour of the film), so it’s best to end plot discussions there, but viewers will get varying mileage from the more preposterous narrative contrivances. Ultimately, Pearce has crafted a solid, sometimes engrossing, maternal noir that doesn’t require much deep thought and (apart from the final shot) conveys his lack of interest in ambiguity that doesn’t ask it of the viewer in the first place. There’s less space in Pearce’s imagination for emotional complexity, for example, than there is for illuminating previously unseen details of the film’s major twist.
Claire and Kate’s characterizations, in particular, are stunted by a reliance on overly familiar tropes about drug addiction and grief, respectively, that rarely give them the freedom to surprise or challenge the audience. Moore, unsurprisingly, finds a way to make her insecurities more delicately tragic, like a prized heirloom she can only expose to the air with extreme care. It’s a skill she’s possessed her entire career and which she most emphatically deploys in the melodramas of the genre’s current master, Todd Haynes. But these hidden depths can find only so much expression when our avenues into them are voicemail recordings and snippets of sun-dappled memory. Sweeney, on the other hand, is lost, a puddle of tears and shrieks with little depth of pain. That her character is left to be, more or less, an irredeemable menace doesn’t help Sweeney’s cause for empathy, but she struggles to let much humanity shine through even when she’s still in Kate’s — the audience’s — good graces. Which is to say, Echo Valley is successful so long as the viewer remains on the pulpy surface of its premise. Search a little deeper, however, and it’s easy to find that the film’s foundation of character types and scenarios are hardly load-bearing, and its search for some elemental truth about mother-daughter relationships regrettably stops at the most obvious insights.
DIRECTOR: Michael Pearce; CAST: Julianne Moore, Sydney Sweeney, Domhnall Gleeson, Kyle McLachlan; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; IN THEATERS: June 6; STREAMING: June 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 44 min.
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