‘Echo Valley’ Review: Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney Elevate an Otherwise Generic Crime Thriller

If movies have taught us anything it’s that if someone asks you to dispose of a dead body, you say “no.” In fact, movies have taught us this valuable lesson so many times and for so many decades that I’m genuinely shocked when anyone — even in movies — still thinks it’s a smart idea in a dead body situation. There are only two possibilities why this plot point would still be so prevalent: 1. People actually do it in real life all the time (which is a creepy thought) or 2. People generally want the plot of a movie to, you know, happen … so you can’t have everybody doing the smart thing and resolving all their problems halfway through.

“Echo Valley” is the latest in a long line of crime movies where someone gets involved in a dead body situation and makes the snap decision to dispose of the thing. Julianne Moore plays Kate, a grieving widow who can barely keep her horse ranch from falling apart. Sydney Sweeney plays her daughter, Claire, a drug addict who abuses her mother’s love at every turn. When Claire comes home one night, covered in somebody else’s blood (a very inconvenient thing to be covered in), Kate decides to do something about it.

What she does would be rude to reveal, not because it’s terribly clever but because “Echo Valley” takes its sweet time getting to the “story” part of the story, and I don’t want to yuck anyone’s murder movie yum. Suffice it to say it all goes very badly, very quickly. But not so badly that you’d be thrilled by it. It’s more like you’re vaguely interested, in a general crime-y way.

The plot of “Echo Valley” is the worst part of it. The plot makes sense, to the extent that films of this ilk ever do (read: don’t think about it much), but there’s a reason why it takes so long to go for jugular, suspense-wise. For about 40 minutes we’re just spending time with Moore, a great proposition in just about any film, while she acts opposite Sweeney, who is no slouch in the acting department either. “Echo Valley” earns the moment where Kate makes a very bad decision, because I believe she’d make it. Maybe. Some of it anyway.

I have a theory that the best genre films are the films that would be interesting without the genre parts. If you care so much about the teenagers in a slasher movie that you’d happily watch them not die for a few hours, then it makes all the difference when they do die. The same goes for crime films. If a filmmaker like Michael Pearce (“Encounter”) can make characters like Kate and Claire matter so much that you’d just watch them talk about their problems instead of, you know, doing crimes, it won’t matter what happens to them because the audience will be riveted either way.

But “Echo Valley” puts a strain on that theory. The story of Kate and Claire is familiar territory, as far as tales of addicted children and long-suffering parents go. But Moore and Sweeney are captivating performers under just about any circumstances. So when their lives do turn into a Hitchcock riff it should be exciting cinema. Pearce and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby (“Mare of Easttown”) make all the narrative space to build this investment, but the plot still manages to bog it down. It’s just not terribly clever, and not terribly harrowing.

That said, we can still latch onto Moore, whose journey through grief by way of enablement hits some high notes whenever she’s just living her life. When things get bad, really bad, she absconds to her friend’s house, played by Fiona Shaw, drinking wine and swapping stories about getting caught with other women by conservative neighbors, and being protected by an excellent mother. There’s something potent in here about the way women — particularly queer women, and middle-aged women — have each other’s backs and will go to any length to protect each other. “Echo Valley” could have got more mileage off out of this, but eventually it has to get back to murder and blackmail, a.k.a. the stuff it doesn’t do best.

There are a couple of haunting images in “Echo Valley,” especially a shot with Moore and a villainous Domhnall Gleeson that employs an evocative use of slow-motion, and overall it’s a competent project. But it’s a film that struggles to find its identity, and by the time it does, it’s already spent so much time wading through ho-hum criminality that the best parts never get to soar. Moore is great, Sweeney cuts loose and Shaw is reliably excellent. Smart storytelling decisions were made. Other decisions were made too. It adds up to a potpourri of general genre genericness, never making enough noise to rattle, or even produce an echo.

The post ‘Echo Valley’ Review: Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney Elevate an Otherwise Generic Crime Thriller appeared first on TheWrap.