For anyone who wants a classic Julianne Moore Energy, “Echo Valley” by director Michael Pearce looks like a return of the brain star. Before the “shortcuts” and “Boogie Nights” and a well -deserved Oscar victory, Moore played the duly suspect in “The hand that shakes the cradle”. This thriller in the early 90s may have been a potboiler, but Moore stole the spectacle, pushing his teeth into each too mature dialogue line (for example “a woman can feel like a failure if she does not hear 50 large per year and still does not take the time of pipeors and homemade lasagna”).
In the well -cast but frequently illogical offer of Apple TV +, Moore slyly pupils which could have been a routine protection drama. As Kate Garrets, a rural owner of the Pennsylvania farm who will not stop to protect her daughter welcomed by the heroine Claire (Sydney Sweeney), Moore is also committed as a relative that they come – which means that there is no hesitation to do what is “necessary” when Claire presents himself with a corpse in the back of her car. Adding another layer to Moore’s performance, the new widow Kate faced sorrow when he was presented with the threat of losing her only child.
Written by the creator of “Mare of Easttown” Brad Ingelsby, the film poses a series of convincing moral questions, starting with: What would you do if your adult daughter was trapped in a whirlwind of self-destructive behavior? Kate has already devoted each dollar she has to pay for the recovery of Claire. In a cameo to a scene, Kyle Maclachlan represents the alternative to hard love as an exasperated Exasperated Exasperate of Kate, who is ready to throw in the towel, but accepts to write a last check – well aware that her daughter will find a way to waste him.
When Claire presents itself for the first time, the appearance of Haggard de Sweeney is doubly shocking for anyone who saw how radiant the star is in most roles. Here, his destroyed hair is tinged with a rebellious pink, and instead of covering pimples and other imperfections, the makeup department accentuated the red spots on his face and arms. Claire’s arrival is announced by the family’s dog, Cooper, who bares reliably each time it comes back – more warning than a welcome sign, given the drama that Claire inevitably holds at home.
This time, the prodigal girl is babbling on the last fight with her new-nine-nine boyfriend, Ryan (like this scarecrow aroused by a man, Edmund Donovan is the image of the worst nightmare of each mother). The more Kate insists that her daughter leaves him, the more her daughter seems to go back. Moore perfectly captures the impossible situation that Claire puts a mother: her instinct is to protect her daughter from evil, but in fact, Claire is a danger in herself.
The most frightening scene of the film is a fight between Claire and her mother, when the young manipulative woman tries all the tactics imaginable to extort Kate money, from the tear of the hair to the kidnapping of Cooper. Make sure that the second more frightening, because Claire’s buffoonery brings another character threatening in their lives, when her dealer, Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson), presents himself at Echo Valley in search of 10 heroin grandmother. “Your daughter of Junkie has two choices,” he resonates: recovering the missing dope or reimbursing him.
These are not the kind of problem including an autonomous equitation instructor must generally be concerned. So you cannot blame Kate to feel slightly relieved when Claire appears covered with blood – not hers, but that of Ryan, the sobting girl insists – because the prospect of Claire having accidentally killed her abusive catalyst is infinitely better than the opposite scenario.
The director of a real actor, Pearce seems to be attracted to situations that push ordinary characters to extremes (which was just as true for the previous functionalities “Beast” and “Meeting” because she is “Echo Valley”). Here, Kate sends her daughter to her room and moves in damage control mode, leading the corpse to a neighboring lake and trusting a few concrete blocks to slide it to the bottom (surprisingly shallow). Ingelsby’s script has a lot of twists and turns in its round, but the best occurs in the film’s second plan, when a detail is strategically omitted from the film’s marketing campaign.
Kate’s partner – the one who died a few months before the start of the film – was a woman. Although it is a non-professional for everyone in history, the history of lesbian angles gives “Echo Valley” a photo of originality that it lacks otherwise, as well as a circle of emotional support of a group of female friends led by Fiona Shaw. Tonally, the film seems like all these so-called “psychological thrillers” of the 1990s (a respectable label for the glorified films of women in play), but the film he looks most closely came a few years later: “The Deep End”, with Tilda Swinton. The two give their stars a real psychology to explore, playing mothers who pay to protect their children – even if “Echo Valley” ceases to have a logical meaning when the character of Gleeson amounts to extorting more money from Kate.
When you are just looking for something semi-interesting to disseminate, stories like these do not necessarily require great actors, but the great actors are the reason why some of them still affect our memory of decades later.
