Echo Valley ending explained: Does Kate forgive Claire? Julianne Moore explains

Moore stars as Kate Garrettson, a grieving woman living on a southern Pennsylvania horse farm whose already strained relationship with her daughter Claire (Sweeney) is further tested when the latter arrives at her door covered in blood and begging for help.

What follows is a twisty tale that not only puts the extremes of Kate's motherly love to the test but also sees her having to deal with terrifying drug dealer Jackie (Gleeson), who soon becomes firmly involved in the situation.

It all leads up to one incredible twist in the final act before the film ends on something of an open-ended cliffhanger. Seen the film and need those final moments unpacked? Read on to have the Echo Valley ending explained.

Echo Valley ending explained: How does Kate outsmart Jackie?

Towards the end of the film, things had been looking pretty rough for Kate. Jackie was aware that she had dumped Greg Kaminski's body at the bottom of the lake to protect her daughter (she had initially thought the body belonged to Claire's boyfriend Ryan), and so had blackmailed her into funnelling him lots of money.

He had also concocted a plan that would see her burn down her barn and kill some of her horses so he could claim the insurance money.

Initially it looked like his plan has been successful, and worse still for Kate that she has been implicated when evidence of the flare she had used to start the fire was found by police at the scene.

Only, in a late twist, it turns out that she has actually outsmarted Jackie – with the action then briefly flashing back to showing how she did it.

Under the cover of darkness, Kate and her best friend Leslie (Shaw) had gone back to the lake to retrieve the corpse and had then placed it in the barn so that it would burn along with everyone else after she had started the fire.

She then made it look like Jackie had started the fire by mentioning to police that he had previously been visited by Greg at the barn and deliberately leaving a piece of the flare as evidence so it was clear how the fire had been started.

Meanwhile, she was helped by the fact that there was also CCTV evidence of Jackie buying the flare before he gave it to her to start the fire, meaning that to the police it very much looks like Jackie had started the fire to cover up the fact he had killed Greg.

Unsurprisingly, they don't believe Jackie's attempted explanation of what really happened for a second and he is arrested while Kate goes free.

Speaking about telegraphing the twist, Michael Pearce exclusively told RadioTimes.com: "I spoke a lot with my cinematographer Ben Kračun about trying to... not set rules, but like parameters, or kind of an attitude when we're filming.

"Because it's got all these twists and turns, we felt like we should have a very unfussy approach to the way that we shot it, and kind of be confident, to be simple sometimes, and be curious about human behaviour. So we were trying not to have too much cinematic engineering or trickery."

He added: "It was more in the edit where we were calibrating how to set up a piece of information and to make sure that a twist lands and that the audience wasn't ahead of the movie.

"So me and my editor, Maya Maffioli, would screen the film a lot, like, almost once we got the film on its legs and we had a director's cut, we'd get audiences into our edit room every Friday and watch it with them and ask them, 'When did you know this was happening?' Because you kind of lose your perspective.

"You can never be a first-time viewer, obviously, when you've read the script and you've made the film. So that was our process. And then we did a test screening out in Pasadena, and that, again, was 600 people. And that was the thing that we were looking for was, you know: What information do they have? What secrets do we want to keep from an audience?"

Moore added that she "was so appreciative as an actor that there was never a tell".

She explained: "When I'm playing something, and we are telling a story, I want to be true to that story and true to that character's actions, and true to how this character would be perceived in real life.

"And in real life, people don't tell – and I always get very frustrated when I feel like I'm watching a film, I'm like, well, they wouldn't say it that way, you know. And so I love the fact that [Pearce] didn't want to do that, there was a restraint to how he told the story and how people behave.

"We felt like we were all in the same movie and there were parameters because when people want to do something, you know, they do it. You can't see it."

Does Kate forgive Claire at the end of Echo Valley?

Towards the very end of the film, we see that Kate has received a text from her daughter Claire begging for forgiveness for her role in the situation Kate had ended up in – but it's unclear exactly whether she is prepared to do so, even though she is clearly missing her daughter very deeply.

This then leads to the very final scene, which sees Claire arriving back at her mother's house. After a close-up on Kate's face once the doorbell rings, the camera cuts to black before we find out whether she decides to open the door – with it left deliberately open-ended exactly what option she takes.

Moore claims that while she agrees that it is open to interpretation, she has her own idea as to what course of action Kate takes.

"I do... I mean, I have my opinion, but I think everybody will," she said. "I think that's why it is open-ended. I think it's just... I think there's a feeling of, like, what would I do after all of that? What would my decision be? So there's that, but there's also, what's the right thing to do?

"The whole movie has been about that. It's been about somebody making a choice, and having a big, complicated decision. And I think you're faced at the end of the movie with that same idea, like, this is going to be a complicated decision, no matter what she chooses, it is going to be challenging."

Meanwhile, Pearce said that he had been interested to hear "diametrically opposed interpretations" from audiences who have seen the film so far.

"I went to a Q&A in New York last week and there was two women friends, and they've got children of the same age," he explained. "One of them said, 'She doesn't open the door, right? She shuts it.' And then her friend said, 'What are you talking about? She's totally gonna open the door and let her in.'

"And then they started to have, like, almost an argument between them, you know? So it can invite a different interpretation. I feel like there was enough clues in this scene before, when you're seeing Kate's character get out of bed, and how she sort of heads into the day, that maybe there's a qualitative difference, like where she is in her life.

"Maybe she's a bit more robust than when we met her at the beginning, and that's probably going to dictate the terms of the relationship if she does let her daughter in.

"But hopefully we're putting enough hints in there that it's kind of, you know, it's there if you're looking for it, but you also... it's nice when two friends see the same movie and they can argue about it!"

Echo Valley is streaming now on Apple TV+. Subscribe to Apple TV+ here.

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