There are few things better than a totally committed Natalie Portman performance – from her full-throttle descent in Black Swan, to her recent mesmerising turn in May December. And for her next project, she’s once again tumbling down a rabbithole for Apple TV+ series Lady In The Lake – not, as it sounds, a tale of Arthurian legend, but a psychological drama wrapped around a murder mystery. Adapted from Laura Lippman’s novel of the same name, the show sees Portman’s Maddie Schwartz reject her life as a bored 1960s housewife to become an investigative journalist – digging into the death of Moses Ingram’s Cleo Sherwood, whose body was found in a Baltimore lake. Check out the trailer here:
That’s a gripping first look, promising a compulsive watch from Honey Boy director Alma Har’el, with plenty of stylistic flourishes and nightmarish visions. Har’el directed all seven instalments of the show, also writing on a handful of them, and producing the series alongside Portman. And while we all know Portman is reliably excellent in psychological thriller territory, Obi-Wan Kenobi confirmed Ingram as a fantastic performer – the pair of them look set to spin a tantalising mystery here.
Here’s the official synopsis for the show: “When the disappearance of a young girl grips the city of Baltimore on Thanksgiving 1966, the lives of two women converge on a fatal collision course. Maddie Schwartz (Natalie Portman) is a Jewish housewife seeking to shed a secret past and reinvent herself as an investigative journalist, and Cleo Johnson (Moses Ingram) is a mother navigating the political underbelly of Black Baltimore while struggling to provide for her family. Their disparate lives seem parallel at first, but when Maddie becomes fixated on Cleo’s mystifying death, a chasm opens that puts everyone around them in danger.”
We’ll see if Lady In The Lake makes as much of a splash as that trailer when it streams on Apple TV+ later this summer. The first two episodes arrive on 19 July, with the rest set to roll out weekly from there.