The Lake House

Alejandro Agresti’s film remakes Il Mare, the 2000 South Korean picture directed by Lee Hyun-seung, from a screenplay by David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer for his play Proof. The gap is not left vague: exactly two years, Kate in 2006 and Alex in 2004, with the mailbox carrying letters between them almost instantly. The house is not set dressing but a real build, put up for the production on Maple Lake near Willow Springs, Illinois, assembled on dry ground and then surrounded with water. It had to come down after filming, and an ordinary fishing dock stands there. The practical result: Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock share very little time in the same frame. Most of the film is two people writing in separate rooms while their letters are read aloud in voiceover. Sold as their first pairing since Speed, it mostly keeps them in scenes shot apart. The architecture is load bearing too: Alex’s father Simon Wyler designed the house, and that reckoning carries part of the weight. A good fit if you do not mind the two leads kept out of the same frame and the story advancing through narrated letters. Not for a viewer who wants a stated rule for how the mailbox works; the film never explains it and builds its ending on that gap.