Echo Valley Review
REVIEW
✦
REVIEW ✦
Echo Valley is the kind of film that knows exactly what tone it wants to strike—and for a while, it hits it beautifully. With its misty Pennsylvania farmland backdrop and claustrophobic emotional tension, the film sets up a tightly wound thriller with just enough simmering unease to pull you in. But while it boasts two strong central performances and a solid structure, Echo Valley ultimately falters when its mediocre twists require more suspension of disbelief than the story earns.
Echo Valley (2025), Apple TV+
Julianne Moore Anchors the Film
Directed by Michael Pearce and penned by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby, the film follows Kate Garrett (Julianne Moore), a grieving horse trainer living in rural isolation after a personal tragedy. Her days are routine, muted, and heavy with silence until her estranged daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) arrives unannounced one night, bloodied, frantic, and clearly entangled in something dangerous. What follows is a slow-burn descent into murky morality—a mother forced to reckon with how far she’ll go to protect her child, even when trust has long since eroded.
Moore gives Echo Valley the quiet gravity it needs. Her performance is internalized, precise, and deeply felt. Moore communicates volumes with the slightest shift in expression or hesitation in her voice. She sells Kate’s anguish, her protective instincts, and the gnawing sense that she might be slipping into something she can’t walk back from. There's no melodrama in Moore's performance—only a clear, bruised humanity that centers the entire film.
Her work is most powerful in the moments of restraint—when Kate chooses silence over confrontation, or when her body language tells us what she won’t say aloud. In many ways, she is the emotional anchor of the film, and without her steady presence, the story's later shifts might completely lose credibility.
Sydney Sweeney Commits to a Difficult Role
Sydney Sweeney, for her part, commits fully to playing Claire—a character who is, without question, difficult to root for. She's jittery, evasive, emotionally messy, and at times downright selfish. But Sweeney never backs away from that challenge. Instead, she leans into Claire’s chaos with conviction, playing her as someone who’s unraveling and trying to survive it. Whether or not audiences sympathize with her, Sweeney ensures they can’t look away.
Claire's motivations remain opaque for much of the film, and Sweeney uses that ambiguity to her advantage. There’s an undercurrent of danger to her performance—a question of whether Claire is a victim, a manipulator, or something in between. That lack of clarity works well early on, but becomes more strained once the film begins revealing its hand.
Echo Valley (2025), Apple TV+
A Strong Setup with Shaky Payoff
The first half of Echo Valley is gripping, especially in how it builds tension through atmosphere and implication. There's something riveting about not knowing exactly what Claire did, or how far Kate is willing to go to protect her. The cinematography and pacing work in tandem to keep the suspense alive without overplaying it. Natural lighting, long silences, and intimate camerawork add to the oppressive, slow-burn tone.
But as the plot unfolds and the reveals pile up, the film starts to strain against its own logic. The grounded realism that defined the opening gradually gives way to a series of choices that feel more like narrative convenience than psychological truth. By the time you reach the climax, some character decisions feel more like mechanisms to keep the story moving than organic emotional beats.
The problem isn’t with the story structure itself—which is technically sound—but with the plausibility of how events escalate. The film asks audiences to buy into increasingly unlikely scenarios, especially in its final act, where the tone shifts closer to pulp thriller than character drama. While some viewers might embrace the genre pivot, others may feel jarred by how sharply the story veers from its grounded beginning.
Atmosphere Over Answers
One thing Echo Valley does well is mood. The setting—foggy mornings, empty pastures, and long stretches of isolated road all contribute to a sense of foreboding. The film is beautifully shot, leaning into the natural bleakness of its environment without over-stylizing.
There’s a constant tension in the quiet—in the unsaid things between Kate and Claire, in the spaces where explanation is withheld. That ambiguity is often more effective than the actual answers the film eventually provides. You want to sit in the discomfort, to see how the characters manage it. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t fully trust that restraint.
Score: 6.5/10
Echo Valley is a well-acted, moody thriller that starts as a slow boil and ends in a sprint—but the transition isn’t as smooth as it could be.
