In The Valley, a wealthy Silicon Valley entrepreneur seeks an explanation for the suicide of his college student daughter. The entrepreneur and his wife were born in India and raised their American-born daughters in the US. Cinequest hosted The Valley’s world premiere.
The Valley gets much about Silicon Valley essentially right; (one guy shows up to a party wearing a necktie, but that’s quibbling). The Valley captures the Valley’s diversity especially well. 38% of Silicon Valley residents were born in a foreign country. Significantly under 50% are white, and over 50% speak a language other than English at home. And it’s impossible to round-up a posse of engineers around here without collecting some Indians and Indo-Americans.
The phenomenon of parents putting extreme and unhealthy academic pressure on kids is common here, and even frequent among immigrant families (and not isolated to Indo-Americans by any means).
Unfortunately, the clunky story is clichéd and predictable. The soapy dialogue is worse, so there’s really not much opportunity for the actors to look like they are behaving instead of acting. This hyper-emo screenplay might have worked on a daytime TV serial, but as a movie, it’s an overwrought mess.