Thirty years after directing Nicole Kidman in the great thriller Dead Calm (watch it HERE), Phillip Noyce has teamed up with Naomi Watts for the new thriller Lakewood, which Vertical Entertainment and Roadside Attractions will be releasing in North America sometime in the first quarter of 2022.
The screenplay for Lakewood was written by Chris Sparling, best known for writing Buried (watch that HERE). Just like Buried, this film centers on one character making phone calls while in a terrifying situation. Here, the story “deals with the sensitive subject of a high school lockdown, but from a mother’s point of view from a distance.” Watts’ character
Amy Carr is desperately racing against time to save her child Noah (Colton Gobbo) as authorities place her small town on lockdown due to an active shooter incident.
Amy is out for a morning jog when she’s notified about the shooting and much of the movie follows her as she runs through the woods, making calls in an effort to figure out exactly what happened and if her son is safe. Instead of taking it easy on Watts and presenting the running scenes with quick cuts, Noyce filmed them in long takes, sometimes having Watts run her way through more than ten pages of script at a time, interacting with fellow actors live on a cell phone as she went… So Lakewood will be interesting to watch just to marvel at Watts’ endurance, if for no other reason.
Watts told Entertainment Weekly,
Sometimes things would go wrong, we’d go for such long stretches that we’d lose signal, and we were in a forest, so sometimes I had to improvise,. There were one or two moments where I felt like I was truly broken, and we’d take a break, but for the most part [Noyce] was pushing me and encouraging me, and I felt in safe hands… He’ll push you to the edge, but softly over the line, and get you to a place where you both feel good about it.”
Lakewood was produced by Watts, Sparling, David Boies, Andrew Corkin, Alex Lalonde, Chris Parker, Zack Schiller, and Dylan Sellers. Devin Andre, Alex Dong, Theo James, Aaron Kaplan, and Tyler Zacharia served as executive producers. Here are some images from the film: