Cooper barks whenever Claire comes back.
It doesn’t matter if Claire’s stoned (again) or begging for money (again) or in trouble (again). Cooper doesn’t care. For the dog, Claire is family. Claire is good. And Claire coming home is, in Cooper’s eyes, worthy of a joyous bark or two.
Claire’s mother, Kate, understands the feeling.
Even now, after years of Claire’s horrific boyfriends and failed stints in rehab and panicked calls from who-knows-where, Kate’s heart still speeds up when her daughter comes home. She smiles. Kate throws her arms around her. She thrills at Claire’s return—thrilled to see her still alive and hoping that this time, this visit, might end better.
It never does, but a mother can hope, can’t she? A mother never stops hoping.
Even now, she hopes.
The last time Claire and Kate saw each other ended in another explosive fight. Claire was going camping with her boyfriend, Ryan, the same guy she’d just run away from just a week or so before. She swore to Kate she wasn’t using again. But she asked for money, always a sure warning sign. And when Kate insisted that she didn’t have any to give, Claire begged. Claire demanded. Claire threatened to kidnap Cooper and abandon him deep in the woods if Kate didn’t cough up some cash.
“He’s going to starve—or worse!” Claire said. And then when Kate shielded the dog, Claire bit her. That’s right. She bit her mother before storming away.
“Everybody f—ing hates you except for me!” Claire spits. One last cut.
That was two nights ago. Two nights of hurt and fury … and worry.
And now, Cooper’s barking again—welcoming Claire back home.
And Kate, still filled with pain and anger and deep, aching sadness, opens the door for her daughter—welcoming her back, and the trouble she surely brings with her.
That trouble turns out to be bad, even by Claire’s standards. She comes back with someone else’s blood on her shirt. She says it’s her boyfriend’s: She hit him in the head with a rock and, while Claire doesn’t say so explicitly, Claire clearly intimates that she killed him. What’s a mother to do? Well, if the mother is Kate, you take the body and dump it in the lake, doing her best to keep her daughter out of trouble.
So, obviously, none of that is positive. It’s downright horrific. But Kate’s impulse to protect Claire stems from one of the most powerful and beautiful impulses imaginable: A mother’s unconditional love. Most parents say that we’d do anything for our kids. In Echo Valley, we see one mother walk that walk—albeit carrying that love to an unimaginable conclusion.
And in that respect, Echo Valley serves as a cautionary tale, too. Yes, we can praise unconditional love. But this film reminds us that sometimes, we must love people differently than either they or we would like to love them—especially if that someone is a manipulative addict.
Kate’s ex-husband, Richard, confronts Kate over how she handles Claire’s troubled returns. He reminds her that they both made pledges to not enable her behavior. “Our daughter is very sick!” he says, and of course he’s right. We can perhaps understand Kate’s desire to protect her daughter. But sometimes, our kids don’t need protection: They need to understand that decisions have consequences.
Kate’s wife recently died, and we see a video of their religiously flavored wedding. We hear about how Kate and Claire used to talk about the “ghost of Marsh Creek Lake.”
As mentioned, Kate was married to another woman: Patty. She constantly listens to old voice messages that Patty left for her, including one where Patty promises to “shower you with kisses” until she’s forgiven for a fight they had.
Kate’s apparent best friend, Leslie, is also a lesbian, and she’s in a relationship. Leslie recounts a story about how someone was scandalized when she overheard “moaning of a sexual nature” inside a barn—moaning coming from Leslie and her lover. Leslie’s mother simply said that Leslie and her companion were apparently doing the “right kind of things.”
When Claire first arrives at Kate’s front door (near the movie’s outset), she says that she’s running away from her boyfriend, Ryan—furious that he was sending illicit pictures to other women when she was sitting beside him. (Which begs the question: Would it have been better had he sent the pictures if Claire had left the room?) But Claire’s soon back with Ryan, and we see them together in the house or apartment they share.
People swim in the lake, wearing a variety of swimsuits. Kate wears a couple of tops that expose some cleavage. We see her in a bra.
Ryan sells drugs for a guy named Jackie, and Jackie seems to be attracted to Claire as well. He asks Claire why she hangs out with a loser like Ryan when (it seems to Jackie) she clearly is attracted to Jackie. Claire says she’s not attracted to him, which leads to the violent encounter.
Jackie pushes Claire and kicks her repeatedly. When Ryan tries to protect his girlfriend, Jackie turns on him and shoves his thumb in Ryan’s eye. Jackie’s attack on Claire comes with a tang of sexual abuse, with Jackie forcing his hand on Claire’s breast.
Jackie physically fights and restrains another woman, too, and he forcibly injects her with a drug that knocks her unconscious.
And of course, like Kate, we’ve got to deal with that pesky dead body.
The corpse is practically mummified when we first see it—covered from head-to-toe in wrappings. Later, when the body resurfaces, the camera zooms in on its bloated, almost unrecognizable face.
A fire consumes a hay-filled barn, threatening the lives of the horses inside. (Someone plotted to kill those horses, by the way—hoping to claim the insurance money for them.)
Claire sometimes expresses suicidal thoughts. We hear that Kate’s wife died after falling from a horse.
We hear about 70 f-words, another dozen s-words and the c-word. A few other vulgarities float to the surface, too, including “b–ch,” “a–hole,” “h—,” “t-ts,” “sk-nk” and “d–n.” God’s name is misused about 15 times (once with the word “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused about seven times. An obscene gesture painted on a rock becomes a landmark of sorts.
To its credit, Echo Valley shows just how destructive drug abuse and addiction can be. But that destructiveness can be very difficult to watch.
Claire is a drug addict: Her drug of choice isn’t specifically mentioned, but it seems to be some sort of opioid. We hear about how Kate spent most of her money on rehab for Claire, but Claire then bolted from the program and never returned. And while Claire insists a few times that she’s clean, Kate finds her almost comatose, clearly after using. When Claire announces that she’s going camping with Ryan, Kate throws several doses of Narcan at her—a drug that can combat an opioid overdose.
Claire’s and Kate’s interactions with each other can sometimes feel beautifully normal, but the addict side of Claire can completely consume the loving daughter Claire, because she’s often willing to do just about anything to get money for her next hit. And that includes playing her own mom’s emotions like a fiddle.
Ryan is likely an addict, too. He’s also a low-level drug dealer under Jackie’s supervision. And when Claire accidentally throws out a half-kilo of drugs with all of Ryan’s stuff, Jackie comes into the picture with a vengeance. He, too, has bosses—and he knows what’ll happen if he can’t reimburse his bosses for their merchandise. “Your junkie daughter has two choices,” Jackie tells Kate. “Give it back, or she can pay me my money.”
[Spoiler Warning] The body that sets the story in motion? It’s not Ryan. Rather, it’s one of his customers who died from a drug overdose. We’re told that Ryan was trying to stretch his merchandise by adding fentanyl to it: We see pictures of the user in happier times—reminding us of the tragic toll of drug addiction.
Kate doesn’t do drugs, but she does drink. When her friend, Leslie, sees just how despondent Kate is, she suggests the two of them “get drunk as skunks … just like old times.” They do, and Leslie has to help Kate climb the stairs to the bedroom and tucks her in (Kate, Leslie and another woman drink fairly heavily in another scene as well.)
In one of Patty’s voicemails to Kate, she apologizes for being “drunk” and “insensitive.”
When Claire tells Kate that she killed Ryan, Kate jumps into action—determined not just to dump the body but to keep the police from investigating her daughter. She concocts a story that she and Claire will tell the police (should they come knocking). She disposes of both of their clothes. She does her best to keep her daughter safe and hopes that the corpse is never found.
But that course of action leaves Kate vulnerable to blackmail. And soon, someone attempts to squeeze a lot of money out of Kate and her estate. The upshot, ultimately, is a lot of lies and schemes—all of which are at least partly intended to fool the police.
A mother yells at and belittles her daughter during a horse-riding lesson.
In the streaming service wars, Apple TV+ tries to fight quantity with quality. While Netflix might hurl out a few original movies every weekend, Apple might release one every few months—but those tend to be pretty good, at least aesthetically. And when those streaming services entered the Oscar fray, the first to break through with a Best Picture win wasn’t a movie from Netflix or Amazon Prime: It was Apple’s CODA.
And that context helps mark Echo Valley as a misfire.
Anchored by Oscar winner Julianne Moore and the ever-so-popular Sydney Sweeney, this thriller is more dispiriting than gripping. And while it does serve as something of a cautionary story, all the content it flings at us makes this a hard film to watch. The language can be extreme, and the plot’s same-sex dalliances were unnecessary in what is, essentially, the story about a troubled daughter and desperate mother.
The content that one could argue is necessary for the story—the drug use, the lies, the scheming—makes the movie that much harder to watch.
For most of the this story, Moore’s Kate looks like she’d love to run away—to bolt from her beloved Echo Valley and leave her ever-growing troubles behind her. And as a viewer, you kind of want her to do just that. But by the time the film ends, you might not be wishing for your own escape from this grim tale of desperate dysfunction, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
