This is my first post on film. I’ve thought about how I could incorporate this into my Substack for a long time since it’s a part of my history. I used to have a film blog called Film Vixen and a film calendar that spanned a year or two ahead and I’d go to all the film festivals to meet the actors at the Q+As. Like the rest of us, I love seeing myself and my stories reflected in film, as well as the fucked up world that filmmakers can bring to life.
I found out about this movie while rummaging through IMDB to make the usual updates to my film calendar. I am so glad I did. It opened this sort of weird symbiosis between the creator and writer Brad Ingelsby and I, because I feel very at home in the realm of the hidden (where I can see the truth), as does he. His stories remind me of my own, his mind fascinating to me. I doubled back in his archives to watch the rest of what he alone created and wrote. His style of writing is: the lies that no one speaks, the truths that people hide in plain sight, the rawness of how fucked up we all really are inside and out. It's the sick things you want to do but never will, lest you get locked up or die. Both within Echo Valley and as I’m seeing in his other work, his characters are not afraid to do those sick things.
In one word, this film was chilling. It is set in Pennsylvania, but was not filmed there instead in the beautiful parts of northern NJ which is really cool. That’s another thing I noticed - he commonly sets the audience up in Pennsylvania, where he was born. I can’t imagine what he experienced there growing up. Kate (Julianne Moore) was cast perfectly as the mom of drug addict/vagabond Claire (Sydney Sweeney), even though I do feel certain parts of the dialogue were empty and disconnected a bit, as well as the relationship between Kate and Claire and Kate’s wife scenes. The storyline is this: as an addict Claire is in and out of her family’s life, but when she’s in she brings her trauma with her and sets it squarely on the shoulders of her mother to handle. Saying more will reveal too much - but the mom is so withdrawn and unassuming in her role, exactly what it called for - and when head kingpin Jackie (Domnhall Gleeson) is introduced, he brings his own darkness which is superb and fucking terrifying at the same time. Sweeney kind of reminds me of that other actor Mia Goth, as she looked a lot like her to me when done up for the film’s premieres, and the roles she’s being given and taking are similar. They seem to fit her and what she can do as an actor, she is not afraid to go all out for roles, I’m looking forward to seeing her in the untitled Christy Martin biopic.
In one particular scene involving the dog it's very apparent how intensely transparent Ingelsby's writing can get, and that's the kind of stuff I love. I can see many people trashing this film but after all it’s hard to hear let alone see the sick truth, it’s not something we are used to.
Jennifer Diane is a goddess of darkness, writer and model based out of New Jersey. Jennifer writes for Healing with the Occult, speaks for the Enlightenment through Hellfire Podcast, and creates books and zines (coming soon).