‘Lady in the Lake’ Review: A Surprisingly Subversive Noir

“When a woman finally enters the attic of her life and finds lost lies, lost memories, broken promises, she realizes how dangerous she was to those around her who believed she knew herself.” So says Cleo Johnson, in a light-hearted voiceover that brings to life the Apple TV+ crime drama set in the 1960s Lady at the Lake. Narration can be a crutch for book-to-screen adaptations; the show is based on the 2019 novel of the same name by executive producer Laura Lippman. But used skillfully – and sparingly – as it is here, rather than being a lazy conduit for exposition, it can deepen the psychological profile of a story. In this case, Cleo’s words are stunning because they perfectly describe the two identity crises at the center of this murder mystery. They’re also scary, because the first thing Cleo tells us, in the series’ opening scene, is her own death.

Lady at the Lake, a seven-part miniseries premiering July 19, takes the form of a neo-noir whodunnit. But hidden within this dark aesthetic is, among other compelling themes, an ambitious deconstruction of the genre. The femmes fatales, the victims and the heroes are the same people; both leads, The Queen’s Gambit Moses Ingram’s Cleo and Natalie Portman’s Maddie Schwartz contain all of these archetypes, but neither of them understand the person she really is. Though she sometimes errs toward the dreamy and diaphanous at the expense of coherence, creator, writer, and director Alma Har’el (Dear boy) manages to do justice to its unusually complicated characters without sacrificing the wild twists or binge-inducing suspense that are among the pleasures we’ve come to expect from this kind of series.

Portman, an executive producer, radiates intensity (despite some distractingly inconsistent accents) in her first major TV role, as a housewife obsessed with the disappearance of a girl in her community. It’s 1966 and Maddie lives with her husband, Milton (Brett Gelman), and their teenage son, Seth (Noah Jupe), in the Jewish enclave of Pikesville, north of Baltimore. Her sudden determination to find Tessie Durst (Bianca Belle) – the daughter of a neighbor, Allan (David Corenswet), with whom she has a past – who disappeared from a tropical fish shop at the town’s Thanksgiving parade, confuses the family. by Maddie. Once the star of her high school newspaper, she abruptly flees Pikesville, moves into a shabby downtown apartment, and begins investigating. Whether she is motivated by Tessie’s situation, her own journalistic aspirations, or her shady history with Allan seems a mystery to both Maddie and us.

Cleo will soon become the next victim in Mrs. Schwartz’s search for an identity. “The truth is,” she reflects, in a voiceover addressed to Maddie, “you reached the end of my story and turned it into your beginning.” Yet Har’el and Ingram, whose layered performance captures the character’s vulnerability as well as her intelligence and courage, insist on making Cleo – a black woman with her own family, jobs, past and dreams – more than than just a vehicle for Maddie’s growth. Much of the series takes place in the month before the discovery of the woman who will become known as “the lady of the lake”. Department store model by day and accountant for local crime boss Shell Gordon (Wood Harris) by night, Cleo spends what little free time she has volunteering for Myrtle Summer (Angela Robinson), a newcomer who challenges her corrupt . employer, in an effort to create a better future for herself and her two children. But she still needs the money that her increasingly dangerous work for Gordon provides.

Despite their obvious differences, Cleo and Maddie have a lot in common. In a refreshing break from the many crime dramas that run a neon yellow marker over every symbol and clue, Har’el lets these similarities shine through and viewers’ awareness of them grows organically. Both are wives and mothers who reach a sudden breaking point and abandon their husbands on that most family-oriented day, Thanksgiving. (Cleo takes her children with her.) Each seeks to escape a narrative written for her by a prejudiced society that thinks every working-class black woman or bourgeois Jewish housewife is the same. They get to know some of the same people. And in a moment of believable chance in the premiere, their paths cross when Maddie sees Cleo modeling a dress in the window and rushes in to buy it for herself.

It’s a typically complex scene. On the surface, we observe the entitlement of a woman who can demand to purchase an expensive-looking dress off the back of a model and the racism of white store clerks who warn her that the clothing may be “rude” after a black woman. used (one of them also, upon learning that Maddie is from Pikesville, makes sure she doesn’t look Jewish). A manager has to practically yank Cleo out of there, without worrying about her comfort, so Maddie can try it out. However, there is also a strange intimacy between Cleo and Maddie, their bodies enclosed in the same silhouette, their skin pressed against the same fabric, just seconds apart, although they have not yet exchanged a word. Given this setup, it’s no wonder that Cleo, as narrator, understands Maddie better than the subject understands the reporter.

Har’el has a talent for imbuing seemingly insignificant moments with multifaceted meaning. Lady at the Lake does not avoid the omnipresent trauma plot, but it evokes characters – both secondary figures and the two protagonists – whose personalities seem distinct from their history and circumstances. He struggles with Maddie’s ambition and Cleo’s self-righteousness; he asks us if his most ruthless decisions are justified. He notices racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, class divisions and, particularly, the way they intersect, without taking us out of the past to criticize them performatively. Most of all, it frees the characters, in the eyes of the viewers if not those of the other characters, from the inappropriate roles they are risking so much to escape.

The show’s visual style further deepens its psychological insight. Har’el dwells on mysterious images of everyday life. The blood from the lamb Maddie gets from the butcher drips onto her coat and it looks like she was stabbed in the abdomen. We enter the parade from the perspective of a drunk dressed as a mailbox (he’s collecting letters for Santa) who stops to pee in an alley. Blurred boundaries separate the present, flashbacks, nightmares and the kind of daydream you might slip into while watching a transcendent set at the club where Cleo’s friend Dora (Jennifer Mogbock) sings, in one of the show’s many sublime musical sequences. It can be difficult to tell what’s really going on and what only exists in a character’s mind.

Most of the time, ambiguity works; Lady at the Lake thrives in liminal spaces. But as the season progresses, mysterious things threaten to take away from the grounded mystery. Har’el begins to make connections in the characters’ subconscious minds that may or may not make sense in reality. A late episode is framed by dreams of excessive duration, the relevance of which to Maddie’s investigation seems a little too clear. Holes in the weave are covered with gauze rather than filled. This doesn’t ruin the impact of the important final twist, but it does mix up some details.

Ultimately, how much you enjoy the series will depend on whether you come to murder mysteries for comfort or whether you want to see the endings of everything in its right place than the typical carefully subverted police supplies. There’s nothing cozy about it Lady at the Lake. But I would prefer the riches he unearths from the attic of his characters’ minds to certainty.