Jeffrey Rayner’s optional but interesting Los Angeles neo-noir Lake George (2024) is a genre black comedy rather than a thriller. As in the God’s Gift Enterprise, events occur in the film when the viewer is perplexed and exclaims “are you all idiots here?” View from the balcony for a million bucks, 2 for the price of 1.
Attention! The review of the film contains spoilers revealing its details.
I remember Shea Whigham in the “Underground Empire” as an absolute evil psycho who was driven to the handle by a government agent assigned to him, for which he paid. Here his hero appears as an already tired elderly man going with the flow. Harut “Stas Mikhailov” is the lackey and bodyguard of Armen (Glenn Fleshler, “True Detective”, “Joker”), a fat drug lord and mafia.
“What's wrong with your arm? "Which arm?"”... Very dark humor.
And now Don, on an old 1983 Merce with a crippled arm and an arsenal of “tools”, is traveling on behalf of a potbelly, unable to refuse an offer that cannot be refused. After the last task, the mafia will pay him the promised debt and he will finally rest somewhere free, and not in places not so remote. But it happens that the victims themselves become hunters.
Shea Whigham and Carrie Coon formed an interesting acting duo. This lady Phyllis is a real psychopath, a pathological liar, even though she looks normal, and she certainly matches her ex-boyfriend Armen. Both are unstable sociopaths, former drug addicts – you can never trust such people.
The film is filled with a sense of melancholy and the absurdity of existence, the main character turned down the wrong path, because of ludomania and greed he embarked on a risky scam, and having screwed up, he lost everything: family, money, house, he is essentially nobody now and can be a tool in the wrong hands. However, he almost doesn’t care, he clings to only one opportunity to return to the place where everything was once fine, he was on vacation with his family and life was still normal. And that’s why he likes not the beaches and the sea, but the mountains. But you can go back to the crime scene, but you can’t go back to the place of love, as the Russian poet used to say.
The ending is somehow familiar, whether he sees it in a near-death delirium or as if it were a waking dream. Don and I both know that miracles don’t happen. He wanted to return to Lake George, and this lake and the pines would be his last home.
