“Lady in the Lake starring Natalie Portman is a frequently compelling, but ultimately unrewarding riff on a traditional murder mystery thriller.”
- Moses Ingram and Byron Bowers’ deeply felt, moving performances
- Alma Har’el’s bold direction
- Several scenes of shocking emotional intensity
- Unevenly developed characters throughout
- Natalie Portman’s sometimes distracting lead performance
- Multiple ham-fisted, tonally awkward dream sequences
Lady in the Lake doesn’t hold back. The new Apple TV+ series from Honey Boy director Alma Har’el may sound like a straightforward investigative thriller on paper, but it’s anything but that. Based on the novel of the same name by Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake is a genre-bending, surreal drama that tries to evenly split its focus between the social and political issues of its 20th-century characters’ lives and the murder mysteries that drive its plot forward. Its scope is shockingly sprawling and it is as stylistically confident as just about any other TV series you’ll see this year.
Through its endless array of disorienting dream sequences and pulpy plot twists, the series strives to keep you on your toes at all times. While that’s an admirable goal, especially for a show as ambitious as Lady in the Lake, the series doesn’t come across as consistently thrilling so much as it does painfully elusive. It has the capacity to be both visually arresting and emotionally gripping, but it proves impossible to ever fully get your hands around.
Set in the post-WWII America of the late 1960s, Lady in the Lake is a murder mystery told by two characters: Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman), a Jewish woman who is pushed to finally break free of her suffocatingly restrictive housewife lifestyle by a local tragedy, and Cleo Johnson (The Queen’s Gambit star Moses Ingram), a Black mother who is hell-bent on climbing her way out of Baltimore’s criminal underbelly in order to secure a better future for herself and her two sons. Maddie and Cleo briefly cross paths during a chance encounter in Lady in the Lake‘s jolting first episode, but their stories only become intertwined after the latter is found dead at the bottom of a lake fountain.
If that seems like a spoiler, you can rest assured that it’s not. Lady in the Lake makes the inevitability of Cleo’s death clear in its opening seconds, and then it spends several episodes building to it. Along the way, viewers watch as Cleo grows increasingly desperate to escape her soul-crushing job working for Baltimore’s Black crime kingpin, Shell Gordon (a perfectly utilized Wood Harris). Meanwhile, after an 11-year-old Jewish girl suddenly goes missing on Thanksgiving, Maddie uses her concern over the girl’s safety as an excuse to leave her lackluster husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and finally try to become the professional journalist she’d once dreamed of being. When Cleo’s body is eventually found, Maddie consequently sees solving her murder as the chance she needs to secure her new life for herself.
Maddie’s initial disillusionment with her marriage is portrayed with an infectiously nervous energy by Portman, whose overall performance shifts repeatedly from sharp to cartoonish. Har’el, who directed the entirety of the seven-episode Apple TV+ show and wrote several of its chapters, matches the ferocity of Portman’s hyped-up turn in Lady in the Lake‘s opening installments with a series of intimate close-ups, shaky handheld shots, and dreamlike images of suburban malaise that pack a considerable collective punch. The same can’t be said for much of Maddie’s post-marriage adventures in Lady in the Lake, though, some of which stretch the show’s brutal real-world logic to its breaking point, while others struggle to ride the line between pointedly self-critical and stylistically and narratively indulgent.
Lady in the Lake finds more consistent success in Cleo’s story, which immediately feels more considered and fleshed-out than her white counterpart’s. This is partly due to the moving performances given by those who surround Ingram, including Byron Bowers, who nearly steals the whole show with his deeply felt turn as Cleo’s on-again, off-again stand-up comedian husband, Slappy. The supporting characters in Cleo’s life, whether it be Harris’ Shell or Bowers’ Slappy, all quickly emerge as multidimensional figures within Lady in the Lake‘s largely segregated, politically turbulent world. That, however, only makes the series itself seem more uneven, given how underdeveloped many of the prominent characters in Maddie’s life, like her son, Seth (Noah Jupe), seem in comparison.
While Ingram’s performance only grows richer and more emotionally vulnerable the further Lady in the Lake gets into her story, Portman’s conversely becomes both colder and more exaggerated. The series, in fact, loses its initially tight hold on Maddie’s story in its second half as it tries to simultaneously draw her further into Cleo’s world and also critique her for the self-centered nature of her interest in solving Cleo’s murder. Lady in the Lake, additionally, attempts to further broaden its already expansive scope in its final few episodes by briefly introducing real-life white nationalist rallies and instances of anti-Semitism that threaten the lives of the show’s characters, but aren’t explored enough to completely justify their inclusion.
Lady in the Lake‘s desire to be more than just another true crime-inspired thriller is both what makes it more interesting than it might have been otherwise and what prevents it from sticking its own landing. There are moments of unvarnished, almost terrifying emotional intensity scattered throughout its seven episodes and more than a few politically and thematically provocative images. As refreshing as its fiercely feminist take on the murder mystery genre is, though, Lady in the Lake simply wants to do too much all the time. It packs more onto its story than it’s able to bear. There are, perhaps, worse fates to befall a TV series, but it’s particularly frustrating to see one as frequently compelling as Lady in the Lake ultimately sink beneath the weight of its own ambitions.
The first two episodes of Lady in the Lake are streaming now on Apple TV+. New installments premiere weekly on Fridays. Digital Trends was given early access to the entire seven-episode series.
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