Julianne Moore has played some right mothers in her time. There was Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, whose pornography career and cocaine addiction costs her access to her child. Or Maude, the outre artist – “My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal” – whose determination to conceive drives much of the plot in The Big Lebowski. Moore was the infernal, domineering mother – the Piper Laurie role – in the 2013 remake of Carrie, and a lesbian cheating on her partner with the sperm donor who fathered their children in The Kids Are All Right. In May December, the most recent of the five pictures she has made with her artistic soulmate, the director Todd Haynes, she became pregnant by a 13-year-old boy, then married and raised a family with him after her release from prison. Shocking, perhaps, but then she had already played a socialite with incestuous designs on her own son (Eddie Redmayne) in Savage Grace. Imagine that lot as a Mother’s Day box set.
Her latest screen mum is in the jangling new thriller Echo Valley. She has a lot of heavy lifting to do as Kate, a morally compromised rancher whose farm is falling apart, along with her life. Some of that lifting is emotional: Kate left her husband for a woman (“I’m the one who ‘ran off with the lesbo ranch hand’,” she sighs) who then died. To add to her woes, Kate’s daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who has addiction problems, calls on her for help after accidentally throwing away $10,000 worth of drugs belonging to a dealer (Domhnall Gleeson).
Some of Moore’s heavy lifting in the film, though, is literal: there is a corpse-disposal sequence that does not go off without a hitch. This is all handled expertly by the British film-maker Michael Pearce, who made his debut directing Jessie Buckley in Beast and therefore has form when it comes to putting tenacious redheads in jeopardy.
