Lady in the Lake is a 2024 Apple TV+ limited series created and directed by Alma Har'el and adapted from Laura Lippman's acclaimed novel. Set in 1960s Baltimore, it is a period mystery that braids together two women's lives across the city's sharp lines of race and class.
Natalie Portman stars as Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who abandons her stifling marriage to reinvent herself as an investigative newspaper reporter and becomes fixated on an unsolved death. Moses Ingram plays Cleo Johnson, a Black woman navigating Baltimore's political and nightlife worlds, whose fate becomes entangled with Maddie's pursuit of a story. The series uses the two women's parallel narration to interrogate ambition, visibility, and who gets to tell whose story.
The series marked a high-profile move into television for Portman and drew attention for Har'el's dreamlike, stylistically bold direction and its evocative recreation of mid-century Baltimore. Critics praised the central performances and the show's ambition even as they debated its hallucinatory, non-linear structure. It streams on Apple TV+.
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