The Lie Review: A Deadly Secret

Release date: October 6, 2020
Running time: 95 minutes
Starring: Mireille Enos, Peter Sarsgaard, and Joey King
Written and Directed by: Veena Sud 

Welcome to the Blumhouse is a seasonal horror event by Amazon and Blumhouse that is releasing four horror movies during October in two waves.  The Lie is part of the first wave of movies, and chronicles a family whose teenage daughter Kayla (King) confesses to impulsively killing her best friend.  This leads her two desperate parents to attempt to cover up the horrific crime, leading them into a complicated web of lies and deception. 

The Lie starts off simply enough with a relatively straightforward scenario to introduce the family, introduce the victim Brittany, and set up the whole scenario.  The main setup for the lie itself develops very quickly and seems to spiral out of control far too rapidly.  It was a fairly unbelievable setup and only seemed to serve the purpose of getting the story going.  However, what develops after that lie is a suspenseful and tense string of events as the family copes with the consequences of Kayla's actions.  The setup itself is very simple but what occurs after is a testament to the strong acting of the Enos, Sarsgaard, and King.  Much of what they do is ambiguous as the family tries to pretend that nothing happened while also dealing with a growing amount of evidence to the contrary.   And it is this uncertainty and unpredictability that makes this film an interesting one.

As you would expect from a film like this, the story eventually begins to spiral out of control.  But most of this seems standard, run of the mill for a movie like this.  However, some of the steps that were taken and the oversights that happened just didn't really make much sense at the time.  It seems like there were other ways around these scenarios, but if they were more rational you wouldn't get the kind of drama and tension you see in this film.  However, it wasn't until the last 10 minutes of the movie where everything really came together and turned this into an intriguing film.  Honestly, this is a rare movie where the ending of the film elevates the entire picture and changes it from something I felt I had seen before to something much more interesting.  It really pulls everything together and puts a lot of what happened that earlier just seemed like ridiculousness into context.  And although the ending is a great cap to this film, it still doesn't explain some of the decisions that were made.  Some of them will leave you scratching your head when seen in light of what happened, but overall the Lie is a suspenseful, enjoyable deception film.

The Lie is a suspenseful deception film with stellar acting, a simple setup, and a meaningful ending that elevates the entire experience.

Rent it.

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The Lie is available to stream on Amazon Prime starting October 6, 2020.