'Echo Valley' review: Julianne Moore elevates Apple TV+ thriller

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Julianne Moore's Kate Garrett can barely keep the lights on at her Pennsylvania horse farm. An early scene in the Apple TV+ movie "Echo Valley" finds her soliciting funds to fix her roof from her ex-husband Richard (Kyle MacLachlan, tragically underutilized).

Kate's troubles extend far beyond the financial. She's stricken with grief over the recent death of her wife in an accident. And her daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney) has struggled with drug abuse, only showing up at the farm when she needs something from her mother.

What sounds like a serious drama about addiction and its impact on a mother-daughter relationship veers instead toward the terrain of a twisty thriller, as the story works in betrayals, a dead body, a vicious criminal played by Domhnall Gleeson, an extortion plot and more.

The director is Michael Pearce ("Beast") and the writer, Brad Ingelsby, created "Mare of Easttown."

MY SAY This is a classic example of an actor elevating a movie beyond where it would have landed with a lesser talent.

It's hard to be surprised by anything Moore does these days. She's been one of the best and most interesting actors for decades, a performer with seemingly limitless range. Just watch this movie and another current high-profile project, the Netflix series "Sirens," to see that chameleonic talent on display.

But don't take her for granted.

She takes the second-rate material in "Echo Valley" and infuses it with real depth of feeling, making a character who might have seemed fairly one-dimensional on the page into a person of serious and resonant complications. 

She makes you believe that Kate would do some ridiculously dangerous and thoughtless things for a daughter she loves fiercely, even when Claire seems bent on doing nothing but manipulating and abusing her mother.

There's a compelling infrastructure here. The filmmaker infuses the farm with atmosphere. Its decaying, darkened rooms effectively reflect Kate's tumultuous inner world. It's barely hanging together, just like its sole inhabitant.

But nothing can fully distract from the ways in which the plot cycles through its motions, harboring an interesting revelation or two, but ultimately going nowhere.

It relies on twists for the sake of twists, on elaborate schemes that are hastily explained and don't make a lot of sense.

With more time to develop this world and these characters, perhaps in the form of a limited series, the audience might have been given the chance to better connect with the attempts to explore the limits of a mother's seemingly unconditional love for her daughter. Sweeney has to hit the same basic note of frenzied anger in this movie, with little time to complicate her portrayal of Claire.

"Echo Valley" rushes toward its conclusion, packing in some violent struggles, a drugging, two scenes involving the aforementioned dead body and a darkened lake, and all sorts of other touches that hit the thriller genre requirements but distract from the story's essence.

BOTTOM LINE Moore is so good, the movie nearly works.