There’s something quite special about seeing Natalie Portman back in a tweed two-piece – exactly the type of outfit she wore playing Jackie Kennedy in 2016’s Jackie.
But don’t expect any of the subtle nuance and poise that earned her an Oscar nomination from Lady in the Lake. Overblown and lacking in any real depth, Apple TV+’s latest thriller (and Portman’s TV debut) is nothing more than simply OK.
Portman plays Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife in Sixties Baltimore who spends her days cooking for and picking up after her husband Milton (Fleabag’s Brett Gelman) and son, Seth (Noah Jupe). But – like many of her ilk in these period dramas – she’s finally had enough. Permanently harried and distraught, she becomes obsessed with finding a local girl who has gone missing. When she does just that, discovering young Tessie’s dead body at the side of a lake, Maddie decides to invoke the journalistic skills she honed at high school and investigate.
Running in tandem with Maddie’s unravelling is the story of Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram, fantastic), who we first meet in a flash-forward, as a dead woman being shunted off a boat into the same eponymous lake. Cleo’s accusatory, posthumous voiceover narrates the episodes, indicting Maddie’s fixation with both deaths as self-serving – “you said no one cared until you came along”, she says ominously.
We follow Cleo’s life making ends meet behind the bar of a club, as an illegal bookmaker and as a window model in a fancy department store, all the while volunteering for Baltimore’s first Black female senator. Cleo is outspoken and forthright; there are many who would want to see the back of her.
But Lady in the Lake is less a murder mystery, more a needling of the lives of the two women at its centre. The series is at pains to show just how desperate they are to escape the boxes – struggling angry Black woman, put-upon subservient Jewish housewife – they have been forced into. They may look, sound and act different, but they have more in common than one might think.
It’s all a bit lofty, especially for a series with a plot that wouldn’t be out of place on an average ITV1 midweek drama. Bizarre dips into the surreal – a bloke having a bath with some fish while wearing a creepy gas mask, or visions of seahorses and sheep, for example – make for intrigue, but ultimately distracted me from the story at hand.
Apple TV+ has long been one of my favourite streaming services thanks to its fondness for bold, experimental programming. Severance, Slow Horses, Pachinko and Bad Sisters were all fantastic. But over the past year its output has largely been style over substance – throwing money at Hollywood superstars and set design at the expense of the things that make a good TV show: a decent script, a sensical story and, when it comes to thrillers, gobsmacking twists. Masters of the Air, Lessons in Chemistry, Franklin and Manhunt have all failed to live up to my (probably too high) expectations.
On its surface, Lady in the Lake is the sort of glossy, noir crime drama that audiences will lap up. But look below the waterline and you’ll find there’s not much to truly get stuck into. It’s not bad by any stretch of the imagination – the acting is good, the atmosphere undeniable – but its not as good as Natalie Portman would want it to be, either. It takes more than just a couple of dead bodies and some miserable women to make a thriller watchable.
New episodes of ‘Lady in the Lake’ will stream on Fridays on Apple TV+.