Natalie Portman gives a performance as understated as her 1960s bouffant is big and scene-stealing in eerie period thriller Lady in the Lake (Apple TV+, from Friday). Adapted from the 2019 bestseller by Laura Lippman – itself loosely based on two real-life incidents in Baltimore, Maryland – it stars Portman as a Jewish mother so distressed by the disappearance of a child from her community that she leaves her husband and sets off in search of the girl herself.
A clunkier drama might have portrayed Portman’s Maddie Schwartz as a self-destructive flake or crusading heroine. But Lady in the Lake leaves it to the viewer to reach their own conclusions. In any event, the storyline takes a back seat to the ominous gothic energy that is the series’s hallmark. This isn’t a fun watch: it has a nightmarish quality that occasionally verges on the supernatural.
There are lots of well-observed vintage details. In particular, the show benefits from being filmed on location in Baltimore – brought unsettlingly to life as a city of shadows, cold avenues and macabre Christmas parades. In one disturbing early scene, we see the soon-to-be-abducted Tessie Fine wander away from her parents and into a creepy pet store. As she gazes at seahorses in a tank, a giant clown balloon looms through the window and over her shoulder. It’s terrifying (it is no coincidence that Stephen King is a fan of Lippman’s book, describing it in the New York Times as “haunting”).
Portman brings a slow-burning angst to Maddie, an aspiring journalist who has settled for second best in her mediocre spouse Milton (Strangers Things’s Brett Gelman). She is matched by Moses Ingram as Cleo Sherwood, a struggling African-American woman whose daily experiences are so different from that of the middle-class Maddie they might as well live on different planets. But their paths cross when Cleo disappears, and Maddie realises that the response of the authorities is very different when the missing person is a black woman rather than a white child.
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Lady in the Lake is brooding, surreal viewing and is the latest in a string of melancholic Apple TV dramas that make few compromises to the casual binger (see also Elisabeth Moss’s Shining Girls and the Julianne Moore adaptation of Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story). It’s requires a lot of upfront investment – the audience is asked to adjust to its slow pacing, its murky camera work, and mumbled dialogue. If you’re up for all of that, Lady in the Lake casts a potent spell – but it isn’t for everyone.
