How ‘Echo Valley’ thriller starring Sydney Sweeney, Julianne Moore found a home in N.J.

Kate Garretson is already reeling from tragedy when a new horror shows up at her doorstep.

Her daughter, Claire, is a crying wreck.

Struggling with drug addiction, she usually comes home when she needs money. But this time, she looks like she’s having a complete breakdown. And there’s blood on her shirt.

Claire says she had a fight with her boyfriend. But this was no everyday fight — at the end, he was dead.

Surely it was an accident, her mother says.

“No,” Claire says through tears. “I hit him ... with a rock.”

Kate freezes.

She suddenly has a dead body on her hands.

That’s just the beginning of the drama in “Echo Valley,” a twisty thriller starring Oscar winner Julianne Moore and Emmy nominee Sydney Sweeney.

The movie, which filmed in a bucolic slice of New Jersey, premieres Friday (June 13) on Apple TV+.

“Echo Valley” unfolds in the verdant landscape of a horse farm. (Don’t worry, the setup above is all in the trailer, so no spoilers.)

Kate (Moore) lives and works at Echo Valley as a horse trainer who gives riding lessons.

Pastoral scenes aren’t just a backdrop — they’re also a crucial part of the storytelling. And yes, the farm might as well be another character in the summertime thriller.

The Ridley Scott-produced movie, penned by “Mare of Easttown” screenwriter Brad Ingelsby, is set in Ingelsby’s native Pennsylvania. But director Michael Pearce filmed on a horse farm in Hunterdon County.

The private farm is located in Delaware Township, which sits on the Delaware River across from Pennsylvania.

Pearce tells NJ Advance Media it was quite the journey to pick and secure the “perfect” Jersey setting.

“It took a long, long time to find that location,“ he says. ”We felt like we saw every horse farm in New Jersey and they didn’t have all of the things that we were looking for, because we needed a place that looked idyllic enough that you understood why Julianne’s character wanted to keep hold of it. It needed to be atmospheric and evocative enough that you could sustain three quarters of the movie there. It needed this big old barn and this apartment above the stables, and it was just hard to find a place that ticked all those boxes."

Pearce, Moore and Sweeney (Claire) filmed at the farm and its main house.

“We found this location very late in preproduction,” he says. “We were only a few weeks away from shooting, and we all breathed a big sigh of relief, because I went there with my production team and we walked around and we looked at each other and we were all nodding. And we were like ‘wow, this is the place.’ It was a bit tricky to get because it was being sold. So I think the lawyers at the production company didn’t want us to work there because it was in escrow. But in the end, we just campaigned and we said it had to be this farm. There’s no plan B.”

‘Jersey’ director visits the real Echo Valley

Pearce himself hails from Jersey.

Not our Jersey, but the “old” Jersey.

The director grew up on the largest of the Channel Islands.

In 2019, the British filmmaker won the BAFTA Film Award for outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer for his Jersey-set movie “Beast,” starring Jessie Buckley. His second film was the Amazon movie "Encounter” (2021), starring Riz Ahmed and Octavia Spencer.

Michael Pruss, a producer with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, sent Pearce Ingelsby’s “Echo Valley” script.

“I think within an hour, I just kind of raced through it and I was so taken by the material,” Pearce says.

He knew he had to make a case to direct the film.

“I’m desperate to do this movie,” Pearce told Pruss.

“It had all the things that I want from a script,” he says. “It had characters that felt three-dimensional, or they were specific, and he (Ingelsby) has such a good ear for dialogue. And it had such a great sense of place — the texture of Pennsylvania — and it was tense and it was surprising and it had these rich themes.”

Ingelsby’s HBO limited series “Mare of Easttown,” for which Kate Winslet won an Emmy in 2021, was so memorably set in Delaware County, boasting Winslet’s take on the Delco accent and plenty of Wawa. The screenwriter grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, in Chester County.

“Echo Valley” is inspired by a real horse farm of the same name owned by Ingelsby’s aunt, who, like Kate, owned and boarded horses and rented out an apartment above the barn.

“So much of his inspiration comes from people that he’s met or stories that he’s heard,” Pearce says. “We actually went to his aunt’s house to visit the real place and just to meet her, the person who kind of inspired this story. I was quietly hoping that her location would work for the film, but it just wasn’t quite right (for the screen) ... I totally understood why Brad was inspired by it.”

Daughter dearest

The serenity of the horse farm in the movie belies Kate’s internal state.

She’s churning with grief after the loss of her wife, Patty (Kristina Valada-Viars), in a terrible accident on the farm, when Claire bulldozes in.

The fury of a daughter in the throes of addiction has the horse trainer even more overwhelmed. Kate is always bending over backwards to help Claire, who plays her like a fiddle.

“Sydney’s character is extremely savvy and very wily and she knows that,” Pearce says. “She knows how to manipulate her mother whilst also genuinely loving her. I love those contradictions within that relationship — it’s so fun to get stuck into that. You don’t have that kind of thing, usually, in a thriller. I think that’s what drew the actors to the material ... You could just make a straight drama with the character that is written."

Claire’s single-minded pursuit of feeding her drug habit — and all of the complications that brings — drags on, emptying Kate’s bank account after an expensive attempt at rehab and constant requests for money.

Kate is now so broke that she has to ask her ex-husband, Claire’s lawyer dad Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), for money to repair the barn roof.

In trying to be there for the spiraling Claire, Kate is working to fix a problem that seemingly doesn’t have any solution. Her daughter’s addiction and the life that comes with it takes the farmhouse to some dark places.

The timing couldn’t be worse.

Though it’s been a while since Patty died, Kate is still in mourning. She’s always playing her wife’s old voice messages as a way to hold on to her just a bit longer.

Kate has been through it with Claire and has been burned by her daughter in the past, but she won’t turn away.

“Sydney’s character is all she has left,” Pearce says. “Julianne’s character will do anything to maintain that relationship, and she tries to walk a fine line and create some parameters, but she breaks her own rules.

“We never liked to put a label on of her being an enabler or anything like that. It felt like it kind of flattens your perspective on a character. And I think it’s murkier than that ... I have a lot of empathy when she indulges in Claire, ‘cause what are you going to do? You’re going to want to protect your child.”

Claire and her boyfriend Ryan (Edmund Donovan), a fellow drug user, open the door to even more trouble. They disrupt the quiet horse farm by bringing the sinister drug dealer Jackie (Domhnall Gleeson) into the picture.

Fiona Shaw joins Moore, Sweeney, Gleeson and company as Leslie, Kate’s ride-or-die friend, who helps her think about how to respond to an increasingly dire situation.

Moore and Sweeney (“Euphoria,” “The White Lotus,” “Anyone But You,” “Reality”) easily fell into the mother-daughter dynamic, Pearce says.

“They were so excited to work with each other,” he says.

“Sometimes directing is about choosing not to get in the way of something when it’s working, and seeing them bond, I was like ‘OK, this is something I don’t need to worry about.’

“I felt very privileged to be there on set every day and be surrounded by such a great caliber of actors. I was learning a lot from them and feeding off of their energy and excitement that they brought into the day’s work.”

A real barn burner

There’s plenty of red-hot angst in “Echo Valley.”

Actual fire, too.

The film has a huge barn blaze.

“We couldn’t burn the actual barn because it’s quite historic, but I really didn’t want to do a VFX fire,” Pearce says. “I wanted for it to be real. So we had to get a plot of land just down the road and then build the facade, build a kind of model barn ... That was a big undertaking. It took weeks for the design team to construct it.”

The problem with setting a barn on fire was that the movie burn was scheduled to happen at the same time as the 2023 Canadian wildfires.

“There was a ban on all open burns,” says Janice Kovach, the mayor of Clinton and a commissioner with the New Jersey Motion Picture and Television Commission.

But Kovach was able to work with the Department of Environmental Protection to make an exception for that day of filming. The inferno went on as planned, with the local fire department and EMS on hand.

The fire echoes a barn blaze set for another locally made thriller that deals in grief, the 2022 movie “Goodnight Mommy“ starring Naomi Watts, which filmed in Bedminster.

“We were all really nervous on the day,“ Pearce says of the choreographed ”Echo Valley” burn.

”I think we had three cameras on air. We had Julie and Fiona and stunt doubles and we set it on fire and it burned within about five minutes. It was so hot, I think all of our faces were red at the end of it, and it was kind of terrifying. I mean, a real big fire like that is like a wild animal that you don’t want to get too near to. But we got a lot of great material. So when we were in the edit, I was just so thankful that we made that choice to burn the real barn, because we just wouldn’t have had that if we didn’t do it that way."

“Echo Valley” filming started in 2023, then stopped for the Screen Actors Guild strike and continued in June 2024.

The state Economic Development Authority tells NJ Advance Media that the production spent $33.5 million in New Jersey and received a $12.3 million tax credit.

Besides the horse farm, the production filmed at Lower Creek Road in Delaware Township.

“They had never experienced a production in Delaware Township before,” Kovach tells NJ Advance Media.

The movie also filmed some pivotal scenes at Mount Hope Pond in Rockaway Township.

Other locations included West Amwell police and fire departments; Rosemont Ringoes Road in Stockton; Alexauken Creek Road in Lambertville; Amwell Valley Diner in Ringoes; private homes in Lambertville, Wharton and Westfield; and Montclair at the former United Way building on South Fullerton Avenue as well as Valley Road and Park Street.

Julianne Moore has been something of a regular when it comes to Jersey film and TV production.

She filmed Pedro Almodóvar’s 2024 movie “The Room Next Door” in Montclair and Westfield; “Lisey’s Story,” a 2021 Apple TV+ series from Stephen King, in Franklin Township; and the movie “Far from Heaven” (2002), for which she received an Oscar nomination, in Elizabeth and Bloomfield.

There’s more on the way.

She stars in the upcoming movie musical from East Brunswick’s Jesse Eisenberg, which filmed in Bound Brook earlier this year.

“Echo Valley,” rated R, runs 1 hour and 44 minutes and is streaming on Apple TV+.

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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter/X, @amykup.bsky.social on Bluesky and @kupamy on Instagram and Threads.