Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: LAKEWOOD [Toronto International Film Festival 2021 - Virtual]

Unlike and also like "The Guilty" screened right before it, director Phillip Noyce's film "Lakewood" takes another approach, again motivated by COVID restrictions to tell a story that isolates its main actor (here it is Naomi Watts) as an emergency unfolds around her and yet miles away. It is a good set up and paints a similar picture. The reversal of trauma and family is a different dynamic and no less severe but doesn't hit as powerfully (perhaps because of setting which is likely meant to be ironic in the fact that it is idyllic). This is like part of the point. Much of the action and setting of the movie takes place after Watts leaves on her morning run after trying to motivate her laconic teenage son to head to school. Her husband and her kids' father had died in a car accident a year before. An armed standoff begins at her son's school and the theories start emerging as different people call her. Her life starts unraveling in certain ways.

Again this style makes the audience build an image within their head while they are watching the movie in painting certain pictures of what might be happening. It is a different form of filmmaking, which when done by experienced directors (like Noyce and Fuqua) can be very effective. While its power is less than "The Guilty" simply because that is more compressed in certain ways, it still takes the same approach of perspective and perception, both of those involved and Watt's character herself who just wants to make ue her son is alright. Her daughter is a periphery structure which almost serves as a simple story buffer point early in the story to release pressure. The build up even towards the climax works though the ending, which could have gone both ways, falters a bit. It is effective but not riveting. The film continues to showcase much of the beauty of Northern Ontario, this time in the North Bay (where it was shot). "Lakewood" takes a very prevalent issue in current life, not just in America but in other countries. Despite the shoot being restricted by COVID, this film (like "The Guilty” as well but more in a metaphorical sense), doesn't even speak of the claustrophobia of sorts that necessitated this approach. It simply gives it a slight different identity. B-

By Tim Wassberg