The question as to why a Sydney Sweeney movie isn’t enjoying wide theatrical release looms in the background as we watch Echo Valley (now streaming on Apple TV+). Is it because mid-budget Movies For Adults carry little weight anymore? Is it because Sweeney plays second fiddle to Julianne Moore, who’s great as ever, but not a major box-office draw? Or is it the distributor’s vote of no confidence in a movie that, shall we say, has a few issues? A case could be made for all of the above. The film is from director Michael Pearce (Encounter) and writer Brad Ingelsby, who created HBO series Mare of Easttown and wrote similarly gritty, earthbound films The Way Back and (the underrated) Out of the Furnace; they and their strong cast come up with something that doesn’t quite match the level of talent involved, but nevertheless may be worth a watch anyway.
The Gist: LET IT BE KNOWN that this is not a Sydney Sweeney Bathing Suit Movie. Nor is it even a Sydney Sweeney Combs Her Hair Movie. Echo Valley is her anti-glam movie, where she plays a deeply troubled drug addict with a spotty complexion, flumpy clothes and the ability to make us seriously consider whether we like her or not. And if it sounds like I’m not taking a serious-issue drama seriously enough, well, let it be known that the movie doesn’t take its own serious issues seriously enough either, because it’s ultimately more about resolving its plot than exploring its characters. But hey, it’s a pretty decent plot, as we’ll get into here shortly.
It also takes a minute for Sweeney to show up in the movie: We open on Kate Garrett (Moore), who’s smack in the midst of intense personal struggle. Her wife died suddenly, leaving her alone to tend the farm and horses. She listens to old voicemails from her beloved partner and weeps. She tosses hay bales and fills the feed troughs and is miserable doing it. Depression squashes her motivation, and she continually cancels the riding lessons she conducts. Bills are piling up, and she sheepishly tests the patience of her lawyer ex-husband (Kyle MacLachlan) by asking him for money. Her only outlet is a friend, Jessie (Fiona Shaw), who gives Kate a beer and an ear when she needs to unburden herself. And then there’s her daughter Claire (Sweeney), who tends to turn up wherever and whenever in a physically and psychologically disheveled state – like she does right now. “I’m clean, Mom, I’m good,” Claire insists, but is Kate buying it? I dunno. But she loves and supports her daughter anyway. She’s a good mother.
That latter point is perhaps the problem. The big reason Kate’s bank account is dry? She’s dumped dollar after dollar into Claire’s rehab, and it hasn’t stuck. And at this point, it’s hard to tell if Kate’s coddling her or not. Sometimes a mother’s tough love can only be so tough. Their mother-daughter time is by turns pleasant and fraught: They spend a nice afternoon on the beach at a nearby lake. Then they go home and deal with Claire’s scuzzy boyfriend Ryan (Edmund Donovan), who’s also an addict, and tangled up with a scaly, beady-eyed drug dealer (Domhnall Gleeson) who isn’t above roughing people up, or worse. Especially when Ryan owes the creep money for drugs that Claire unwittingly tossed into the drink during one of their frequent spats. To say “trouble ensues” is grossly reductive, but in the interest of not spoiling things, ensue, trouble indeed does, culminating in this exchange: “What’d you do?” Claire asks. “I took care of it,” Kate replies.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Echo Valley gives off non-supernatural true-crime-ish Stephen King vibes, like, say, Dolores Claiborne or A Good Marriage.
Performance Worth Watching: I’ll be blunt: Sweeney is not the draw here. She’s fine, but I had the nagging sense that this is the type of heavyweight role better suited for, say, Julia Garner. So Echo Valley is Moore’s film, and if it seems a little simplistic to say she alone makes it watchable, so be it: She alone makes it watchable.
Memorable Dialogue: Kate chats with the mother of a young child who’s being a bit of a handful on the beach:
Random mom: Tell me it gets easier!
Kate: Oh god, no. Just you wait. (Pregnant pause as the mom’s face goes dark) I’m just kidding. Every day is a gift.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Echo Valley leans into its fraught mother-daughter dynamic – the line between enabling and tough love is so thin – then leans away, into juicy-pulp storytelling, and if you can hang with it, you’ll be OK. In the second act, Ingelsby concocts an initial whoa moment that further complicates Kate and Claire’s already complicated relationship, then drops another whoa bit for the third that elides logic and becomes wholly preposterous. Preposterous, but entertaining. And satisfying, if you don’t mind rather precariously suspending your disbelief.
The plot leads to a reasonably enjoyable showdown between Moore and the effectively sinister Gleeson, while the mother-daughter story gets essentially shitcanned, transforming a movie about parental sacrifice into something else, and the conclusion it reaches is indeed something else. (I laughed, and I may have pumped a fist, even though I know better.) And so Echo Valley inevitably will be criticized as A Movie That Doesn’t Know What It Wants To Be, and to that I’d counter that it actually does know what it wants to be: entertaining. And well-acted, with a strong sense of place (foreboding rural, woodsy location with a quaint little lake that transforms from paradise to gloomy puddle after dark), with Pearce ably generating pit-of-your-stomach unease as he ramps up the tension.
So what we have here is a rare instance where a suspect screenplay doesn’t sink the movie. At worst, Pearce struggles to balance ridiculous plot twists with nuanced character work. At best, it surprises us in a way that makes sense in dime-store mystery novels, with crimes piling atop crimes, and wisely banks on Moore to sell most of it. For every instance of cheesy slow-mo or overwrought establishing shots communicating ominous portent, we get Moore bringing us back to earth by wordlessly communicating her character’s strength and pain. She even gets one of those moments where she cries until she laughs or laughs until she cries – and we should relish it as much as she does.
Our Call: Echo Valley is such a mixed bag, it’ll require some forgiveness on our part. But I forgave it, and I suspect a bunch of y’all might too. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.