by Charles Kirkland, Jr.
A family is torn apart when a cover-up unravels in the AmazonBlumhouse series movie, The Lie.
One morning while Jay (Peter Sarsgaard) is driving his daughter Kayla (Joey King) to dance camp, they come across Kayla’s friend Britney who’s also going to the camp, standing at a bus stop. In response to the requests of her daughter, Jay stops to pick her up. After a bathroom pit stop, this moment of kindness takes a turn for the worst. In an attempt to pick up the pieces, Jay, Kayla, and her mother, Rebecca (Mireille Enos) find themselves sinking in a swamp of lies.
Written for the screen by and directed by Veena Sud (The Killing, The Salton Sea) based on the film Wir Monster written by Marcus Seibert, The Lie stars Sarsgaard, Enos, and King with Cas Anvar, Patti Kim, and Devery Jacobs. It’s the first film in the “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series collaboration from Amazon and with Jason Blum, the super-producer behind such groundbreaking movies as the Paranormal Activity and The Purge series, Whiplash, Get Out, and Us. The movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September of 2018 and has finally found its way into distribution two years later.
While the Blumhouse label has been known for producing horror films, The Lie is a thriller, not a horror movie. It is tense and dramatic, preying on the basic parental instinct to protect a child and dials up the pressure upon those instincts to an almost maddening level but it does not have the jump scares or gruesome scenes that go along with a typical horror film. The script is sneakily smart in that it addresses its dramatic theme from two angles instead of the usual one direction being that of the main family. The movie is clever with an ending that must be watched but it is not intelligent. There are a couple of gaffes that kind of telegraph where the film is going but does not detract from the power of the ending. It is a little curious though how a woman who is a successful lawyer would not know how to cover her tracks a little better.
The casting is pretty good. Mireille Enos (Hanna, If I Stay) and Peter Sarsgaard (The Magnificent Seven) have believable chemistry as the estranged couple who struggle past their underlying problems to come together for their daughter. Joey King (The Kissing Booth, Going In Style) is exacerbating as the teenage child who alternates between feeling guilty to naïve and clueless.
Rated R for language throughout, some violence, brief sexuality, The Lie is a thriller that is not super smart, short on thrills but high on drama. It is well-acted even when it doesn’t seem so. The best thing is that the end of the movie has a payoff that changes the whole view on what The Lie is which means you might have to watch it twice. It’s not a great movie but it is entertaining.
Grade: C