The recent handful of films that utilize a style called “Screenlife” — real-time looks at a character’s desktop or smartphone display that tell a story through various social media apps — have so far been the best representative of the way we communicate and navigate our lives, especially when in crisis. LAKEWOOD, a new thriller from director Phillip Noyce, writer Chris Sparling and star Naomi Watts, flips the “Screenlife” concept around, showing very little of the iPhone screen of Watts’ Amy and instead focuses solely on her and her immediate surroundings for the entire movie. It’s exactly the type of high concept for a film that clearly appeals to Sparling, who made a name for himself with BURIED (2010), another real-time movie about a man buried alive. The single character (or, at least, single on-screen character) real-time thriller isn’t anything new or innovative per se — this year’s TIFF even includes another one, THE GUILTY — but LAKEWOOD is notable for the way Noyce, Sparling and Watts build character through action, as well as handle a particularly thorny topical premise.
That premise reveals itself gradually through the first act of the film, which begins in compellingly unassuming fashion. A suburban single mother, Amy Carr, wakes up after a long night of sleeping with a self-help audiobook playing. She’s able to get her daughter (Sierra Maltby) out the door to her school easily, but her teenage son, Noah (Colton Gobbo) sullenly refuses to be roused. Assuming he’s staying home from school, Amy goes for a solo run deep in mountainous woods to reflect, as it turns out that the day marks a year since she and her kids lost her husband to a tragic car accident. While trying to juggle an already busy work-from-home schedule and the impending visit of her parents, she hears that a shooting has broken out at a school in town, forcing her to frantically try and confirm which school at first. She discovers that it’s the high school, and while she’s attempting to find help or a way home while alone in the woods, she’s contacted by a local detective who is acting very suspiciously curious about Noah’s habits, emotional state, and potential access to firearms.
There’s always a good deal of contrivance where a high-concept film is concerned, and what’s most impressive about LAKEWOOD is how it manages to sidestep most of those pitfalls. Sure, it’s probably a little too neat that Amy is able to befriend an employee of an auto shop that happens to be within visual distance of the high school so she can get some quick eyewitness information, but the relationship is played well enough to be passable as a moment of kindness from a stranger. Other than that, the film conveys just how many friends, co-workers, and various resources are at our fingertips within our smartphones, making it plausible (let alone possible) for Amy to do all she does while stuck deep in the woods. Her ability to multitask, deftly switching between phone calls, texts, and apps is highly believable and relatable as well as being a clever trick to widen the scope of what is essentially a solo thriller. As elaborate as the events of the film get, it feels continually grounded in reality thanks to this use of recognizable functions of most smartphones, the apps providing Amy a tether to events and people miles away while always reinforcing her distance from them, emphasizing how alone she is.
To that end, Noyce and Watts manage to keep the film as visually suspenseful as it is emotionally tense. Noyce and cinematographer John Brawley find a myriad of ways to shoot Amy moving through the dense woods, allowing the camera to surround her as a visual representation of her increasing desperation and paranoia. Its constant motion compliments Amy’s, as Watts never stops moving for the majority of the film. LAKEWOOD isn’t a stunts-heavy movie at first glance, but taking into account the number of takes normally shot during filming and how Amy is constantly running this way or that reveals just how physical a performance Watts is giving. It may not be as hard or as fast, but Watts likely does more running in the film than Tom Cruise does in any single one of his movies, just as a point of comparison. Amy even becomes a little bit of a horror movie Final Girl, taking a fall and injuring her leg, leaving her with a pronounced limp for the rest of the film that she powers through nonetheless. Watts’ performance keeps Amy grounded as a real person, with the cumulative effect of the obstacles (physical and otherwise) put in her way making her seem that much more heroic.
Where LAKEWOOD runs into trouble is in its treatment of school shootings and the people who perpetrate them. The film leans hard on the idea that Noah could be the shooter, making Amy’s desperate attempts to reach Noah and find a resolution ironically dark and morally complex. The problem is that the film engenders so much empathy for her — after all, she’s the only character on screen for the majority of the runtime — that following such a plot thread was likely too troubling to the filmmakers. Instead, the movie sends Amy on a amateur detective bender where she’s able to discern the identity of the real shooter, a development that is not only a stretch but one that ends up feeling oddly like wish fulfillment, Amy going from emotionally compromised interloper to fully fledged hostage negotiator. As the film wraps up in the most mawkish way possible (the end credits feature a character livestreaming a monologue that most closely resembles an anti-mass shooting PSA), LAKEWOOD drops its grittier thriller elements in favor of approximating the vibe of a daytime TV movie. It’s not quite as egregious as the typical “Oscar Bait” film, but it’s close, the film feeling less grounded the more it indulges in a feel-good catharsis.
Fortunately, Noyce, Watts and Sparling do enough buildup with the rest of the film that the catharsis is generally earned. It’s a testament to the three of them that LAKEWOOD’s many gaps in logic are breezed over (or perhaps that should be ran over), with Watts’ believability and Noyce’s handling of pace and tone not allowing any questions to linger too long before they’re onto the next thing. What LAKEWOOD best captures is the sense of unraveling crisis, the way a normal, average day can suddenly go south incredibly rapidly, forcing action to be taken just as quickly. Ironically, it’s a better representation of screenlife than Screenlife is — where that format artificially never looks away from a screen, LAKEWOOD provides the contrast between the immediate real world and the larger, darker, more dangerous one that lurks simultaneously miles away and at our fingertips.
Tags: Canada, Chris Sparling, John Brawley, Naomi Watts, Ontario, Phillip Noyce, Toronto International Film Festival
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