2024 Needed a Good Neo-Noir. ‘Lake George’ Is (Almost) It.

After the sun-drenched disappointment of Colin Farrell’s Sugar, it’s nice to see a Los Angeles-set neo-noir that manages not to squander its simple premise. When a genre offering can buck convention, all the better; but there’s pleasure in giving in to the formulaic familiarity of a little low-stakes crime carried out by shady characters. In veteran television director Jeffrey Reiner’s film Lake George, which premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival, Reiner uses the audience’s intimacy with L.A. noir to his advantage. The writer-director beefs up his characters beyond the archetypical thugs and cons to create a film that rests firmly on its actors’ backs—occasionally to its detriment.

Reiner is quite good at framing his antihero, Don (Shea Whigham), in a bath of natural California light, and letting Whigham take it from there. Don’s just out of a decade-long stint in prison, and when his ex-wife doesn’t answer the phone, his only choice is to call up his old buddy Armen (Glenn Fleshler) and hope that he’ll be willing to make good on some debts to Don. In prickly situations like these, nothing’s ever as easy as it should be. Armen agrees to pay his debts to Don if Don does him a favor first by killing his girlfriend, Phyllis (Carrie Coon). It’s less of a suggestion than a demand, and Don is quickly pulled back into Armen’s world of low-level crime schemes—the kind that set you up in a Glendale McMansion instead of a sweet Beverly Hills pad.

What follows is a conventional yet perfectly fun neo-noir that doubles as a road trip movie across southern California after Don kidnaps Phyllis and gets more than he bargained for. Reiner gets to the meat of the story without any fuss, and though some might find his style of writing predictable, it benefits Lake George’s modest premise. He finds a reliable star in Whigham, whose pliant character acting once again fits the mold perfectly. But it’s Coon who runs away with the film. As Phyllis, she’s caustic and just unpredictable enough to keep Reiner’s material consistently engaging, elevating Lake George from a substandard neo-noir to a darkly funny and fresh take on the genre.

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