Natalie Portman's Apple TV+ Series Is a Lot but It’s So Good

Lady in the Lake, based on the novel of the same name by Laura Lippman, begins as one could guess: On a lake. This lake’s titular lady is at this moment faceless, just a body in a blue coat on the back of a boat. A man rows the boat to a fountain in the middle of the lake, and after throwing her over his shoulder, dumps her inside. We learn the identity of the victim right away, as she speaks of her death in the first few minutes. Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram)’s narration introduces us to the end of her story, while she speaks directly to one woman in particular. Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) is a Jewish housewife-turned-journalist for The Baltimore Star who found her career success from Cleo’s death. No one cared about Cleo’s story until this white woman started to tell it, Cleo says, but Maddie doesn’t know the beginning or middle of Cleo’s story, which is what series creator Alma Har’el (Honey Boy) wants the audience to discover.

“Truth is, you came at the end of my story and turned it into your beginning.” Profiting on someone’s death or profiting on a family’s grief is seen frequently in modern times, and whether or not Maddie’s intentions are really self-serving is for us to decide, as Cleo’s narration confronts her motives throughout the seven-episode series. While Cleo may haunt the narrative, especially Maddie, she doesn’t remain a faceless figure. Most of the series - its first two episodes now available on Apple TV+ - focuses on what happens before Cleo becomes known as the “Lady in the Lake,” not just what happens after. It’s also not any old murder mystery, either.

Lady in the Lake is, first and foremost, all about dreams. We learn that Maddie’s journalistic inspirations didn’t sprout overnight. It has always been a dream of hers since working on her high school newspaper. But like most women in 1966, she’s stuck as a housewife. Likewise, Cleo wanted to become a singer but found herself following the footsteps of her father, working in a jazz club under the control of men in organized crime. Cleo and Maddie haven’t dreamt for themselves in a long time. “I ain’t got time for dreaming,” Cleo says, but she does throughout for a better life for her two sons; however, Cleo herself is stuck, as options for opportunity are slim for Black women. For Cleo, agency comes in death, but for Maddie, when her life as a housewife begins to crumble, agency comes when she moves into an apartment in a Black neighbour.

Both women want to be someone else and they know exactly who they want to be. Maddie is able to achieve this much easier than Cleo, but also at Cleo’s expense. The reporter steps into a world where she doesn’t belong and makes many questionable decisions to navigate that, with Cleo criticizing her every move in narration along the way. Maddie finds freedom in this world where she’s an outsider, but Cleo can only get a semblance of freedom in death. The question of, “Who am I?” lingers in this series about stifled dreams and identity, with many dream sequences that can be both haunting and like a cinemascope musical, peeling open the show’s often confounding layers in gorgeous cinematography and production design. Lady in the Lake is not just about the murder of Cleo Johnson, but about what women give up for the dreams of men and what they must do to finally achieve their own.

The intersection between both Cleo’s and Maddie’s stories is where the series shines. Whether indirectly or directly, it explores their two different worlds in a way that continually builds intrigue and also highlights what was going on in both the Jewish and Black communities in Baltimore during this time. While their lives contrast, some events have similarities that are edited together brilliantly to work like a mirror. The series also uses flashbacks of both women in their youth and utilizes those moments to illustrate how their pasts heavily influence what is happening in their present. While there is a lot going on plot-wise that may ruin its flow at times, there is tons of thought-provoking imagery throughout, whose meanings aren’t always clear, but makes one that much more invested in what Har’el dishes out on a platter full of unpredictability, secrets, and a stunning turn from Ingram that will leave you shaken.