Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: A mother loves her daughter. The younger woman has issues, ranging from a bad boyfriend to substance-abuse problems. You’d never think it would happen to your kid — but it could! Still, only a fool would underestimate the strength of a mom’s love. When the blowback from this problem child’s dodgy associations threatens to wreck her life, the everymatriarch steps in. She will stop at nothing to protect her offspring.
For decades, we called them “maternal dramas.” Then, starting in the mid 1990s — scholars and scientists carbon-date the tipping point to somewhere around the broadcast of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? — we began folding them into the category simply known as “Lifetime Channel movies.” Yes, this basic cable network’s stable of straight-outta-tabloid thrillers from that golden era ran the full gamut of a suburbanite’s nightmares, from husbands with double lives to black-market baby trafficking. But the teens-in-peril subgenre was especially popular among their viewers, and for a while, stories about mothers going into rescue mode became synonymous with the channel’s programming. (See: this parody.)
Don’t let the premium branding, patina of prestige or star power fool you: Echo Valley, a real handwringer of a momma-paranoia melodrama, may open with the familiar Apple TV+ logo. (It drops on the streaming service on June 13th, after something slightly resembling a week-long theatrical run.) But this sizzling slab of cinema du grilled cheese from British director Michael Pearce (Beast, Encounter) is nothing if not a vintage Lifetime Channel joint, one which just happens to feature an Oscar winner and one of the biggest A-listers under the age of 30. It takes its name from the region of southern Pennsylvania where Julianne Moore runs a horse ranch, yet this purposefully trashy movie could easily have been called “A Child’s Cry for Help,” or “Terror in the Family,” or “For My Daughter’s Honor, Plus Also She’s a Drug Addict and Now There’s a Psychopath Living in My House.”
To be fair, unlike so many of those Lifetime heroines, you couldn’t say that the protagonist’s life looked perfect from the outside. Despite the fact that she owns a gorgeous spread and lives in a lovely, large country home, Kate Garretson (Moore) has been in a state of depression for a while. Her wife, Patty (Kristina Valada-Viars), died nine months ago, and Kate is barely able to get out of bed in the morning. Friends, like her kindly neighbor Leslie (Fiona Shaw), are worried about her mental health. The estate is starting to drift into serious disrepair. She’s been regularly canceling the horseriding lessons she gives the area’s wealthy kids, and is forced to hit up her ex-husband (Kyle MacLachlan) for money. All of these problems pale in comparison, however, to what’s going on with Kate’s kid.
From the second that Claire (Sydney Sweeney) shows up at the house, asking to use her mom’s iPad to check her texts — her phone got thrown in a river by her dickhead boyfriend (Edmund Donovan), but don’t worry, it’s all totally kickin’ back no big deal, everything’s super cool! — you can hear the warning sirens going off. The twentysomething has a slightly twitchy demeanor and facility for emotional manipulation that immediately telegraphs she’s a drug addict. You can also tell that this isn’t a new problem, and that Kate and Claire have done this particular tango a dozen or so times before.
Except this time… remember how that aforementioned boyfriend tossed her phone into the water? She retaliated by dumping some of his stuff off a bridge. And well, there was a bag of narcotics in his jacket, and now that’s gone, and this makes the couple’s dealer, Jackie (Domhnall Gleason, so skeezy you can smell him), pretty angry. Like, beating up Claire in her mom’s front yard kind of mad. Soon, Kate understands how much serious trouble her daughter is in. Luckily for Claire, her mom is the sort that will stop at nothing to make sure her baby girl is safe. By “stop at nothing,” we naturally mean disposing of a corpse, arson, and stopping Jackie from siphoning what’s left of her liquid assets. The things we do for our kids!
On the surface, this may sound like a nice, trashy little diversion. We can confirm the “trashy” part, and you know that any time you give Moore the chance to either weep, become enraged or, in a best case scenario, do both at once, it’s going to reap some sort of dividends. (As for Sweeney, her supporting role is just north of being a glorified cameo. All apologies, Sydney stans and Euphoria fans.) Viewers can sense a third-act turn coming, and when it does, it’s so overly complicated, ludicrous and unbelievable that you’ll find yourself left with a palm-sized imprint on your face for days afterward. You might hear “are you fucking kidding me?!” echoing throughout your living room several times before the end credits roll. You also might be better off bypassing this faux-Lifetime Channel throwback altogether and seeing if Mother, May I Sleep With Danger? is still streaming anywhere.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
From Rolling Stone US
