'Lakewood': Noami Watts Works Overtime In This Ill-Conceived School Shooting Drama [TIFF Review]

I’m not entirely convinced everything needs to be a movie. In this case, I don’t know that there is any way to make a film about the journey of a parent as they hear their child’s school has an active shooter without it feeling exploitative of our nation’s current epidemic of violence. That didn’t stop director Phillip Noyce (“Dead Calm,” “Rabbit-Proof Fence”) and screenwriter Chris Sparling (“Buried”) from trying. Starring Naomi Watts, who also produced the film, “Lakewood” is an ill-conceived one-woman showcase for the actress, who spends most of the film’s 83-minute runtime communicating with others solely through her iPhone.

Beginning with a pan over a blissful lake surrounded by idyllic autumn woods, we hear the voice of a woman reciting mindfulness platitudes. This calm is jarringly interrupted by quick flashes of a car crash. We’re then introduced to Amy Carr (Watts), who texts work from her bed to say she’s taking a personal day. After getting her young daughter Emily (Sierra Maltby) off to school, she attempts to wake her moody teenage son Noah (Colton Gobbo), who prefers to spend all his time in bed. After her nudges fail, she heads off on a long run into a forest filled with serenely twisting trails. This peaceful run, complete with chirping birds, is interrupted by a barrage of incessant phone calls. Returning from a trip, her parents need her to pick up their car. Her daughter left an art project behind. Work needs help on something that can’t wait. A friend FaceTimes to check in on her. Through these conversations, we learn that the coming weekend is the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death in a car accident.

As she heads deeper into the woods, Amy sees police cars going in the other direction but doesn’t think much of them. Just as she turns her phone to do not disturb, she receives an emergency alert warning of an active shooter in the area. Her first reaction is to check Emily’s school. A teacher there informs her that the shooter is actually at the high school. But is Noah? Did he actually get out of bed? The iPhone that had been a distracting burden now becomes her lifeline as she attempts to figure out if her son is in danger.

Thanks to some sleuthing by her mechanic at the garage conveniently located across the street from the high school — with the groan-worthy name of Reliable Autobody — Amy discovers that Noah did make it to school that day. Panic sets in as she struggles to jog her way out of the woods while simultaneously using the phone to gather as much information as she can about the situation. The woods in this small town apparently have superior 5G coverage because not only is Amy able to continually phone her contacts for information, she’s also able to stream video news reports of the situation.

The logistics of this are a bit dubious, but Watts taps into visceral, raw emotions; her performance harkens back to her Oscar-nominated turn in J. A. Bayona’s “The Impossible,” where she played a similarly distressed mother in crisis. Her ability to bring weight and a sense of real connection to those on the other end of the phone is as impressive as Tom Hardy’s one-man and a car phone performance in “Locke.”

Where “Lakewood” begins to lose the thread comes when Amy speaks to the police. Their questioning leads Amy to doubt her own son, who has recently become emotionally withdrawn and even punches holes in the wall of their house. As the police question Amy about Noah, his use of the antidepressant Lexapro is leveraged in such a way as to warrant her suspicion that he could be the shooter. While this sequence allows Watts a great monologue in which she expresses regret towards her possible neglect of his needs and begs him — if it’s true that he is the shooter — to stop, it also perpetuates the demonization of mental illness in teenagers (see also the “school shooter chic” joke in “Dear Evan Hansen”).

Philip Noyce is a natural choice for this kind of film. He’s great with actresses in peril and at keeping tension ramped up to eleven. But using the collective trauma of a generation of parents and children as the backdrop for a real-time thriller, whose lives have proven time and again to matter less than the right to own an AK-47, remains unconscionably distasteful. A post-credits sequence in “Lakewood” — surely a nod to survivors like David Hogg, who have turned to activism after their childhoods were ripped from them in a school shooting event — is meant to feel inspirational but comes across both exploitative and incredibly bleak. Art should absolutely engage with trauma, but not like this. [D]

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