Echo Valley Parent Guide

Since the death of her wife, Kate (Julianne Moore) has struggled to get out of bed, let alone maintain the sizeable horse ranch she owns. Normally she offers riding lessons to make the place pay, but she hasn’t been up to it since her loss. The news gets worse: the expenses have just increased radically with the news that her barn is falling apart and will have to be rebuilt. To increase the difficulty, her daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) has just come home.

Claire is an opioid addict who has bounced in and out of her mom’s life, rehab, and any number of shady drug dens for the last couple of years, with her mother available as a perpetual enabler. This time, though, Claire isn’t just after her mother’s money. This time, Claire comes home covered in someone else’s blood, telling an impossible story about a body out by the lake. And this time, helping her daughter is going to mean a lot more for Kate than scraping together some money or a new phone. This time, it’s life and death.

I had a mixed experience with the movie. On the one hand, the cast is excellent and all of them deliver a strong performance. The pacing is consistent, the dialogue isn’t irritating (although it is sprinkled with profanity), and the setting is gorgeous. On the other hand, some of the twists in this plot don’t really work all that well, and while I think they wrap up neatly, they don’t always make sense.

Family audiences are going to have a bigger problem with the 70-or-so f-bombs lying around the script like so many land mines, and the plot has a lot to do with addiction and murder. So not an ideal choice for the kiddies. On the other hand, there’s very little on screen violence, no sexual content to speak of, and there are hardly any drugs to be seen either, so Echo Valley could be a solid choice for adult audiences looking for a thriller that isn’t going to get too messy.

Focus on those stellar performances and you’ll have a decent enough time skating over the thinner stretches of the plot. As with almost everything, it’s more fun if you don’t overthink it. This may not have the tight construction of a Hitchcock flick, but it’s an intriguing and dramatic thriller, and if that’s your genre, then this is probably worth a watch.