I’d be surprised if another film came out this year that was worse than The Lie. It would take a serious, solid gold turkey to dethrone this thing. I want nothing more than to fill your timeline with positive reviews of films I enjoyed and I don’t try to focus on the negative but sometimes one comes along that just needs to be publicly shamed, if only to set an example. This is a truly awful, misguided, bizarre, tone deaf, incomprehensible excuse for a thriller and I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart that wonderful actors like Mireille Einos, Peter Sarsgaard and young Joey King (she was awesome in The Conjuring) and nice wintry Ontario locations got swept up into this thing’s toxic orbit. A young girl (King) and her father (Sarsgaard) are driving a long stretch of snowy road one day, when they stop off to pick up the girl’s friend. The two argue, the car stops, they run off into the woods to argue some more, and the girl pushes her friend off a high bridge into icy waters below, killing her. What to do? Well not what these people come up with as a plan, for starters. Dad and the girl’s lawyer mom (Mireille Einos) decide to cover up their daughter’s crime, lie to investigators, evade the poor father of the dead girl (Cas Anvar) and generally make the situation as shitty as they can for themselves, their kid and everyone putting in paid hours and stressing out trying to find this missing girl. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck is wrong with these mentally deficient people? How, in any scenario on any planet, when the mom is a goddamn *lawyer*, is it in any way intuitively constructive to play their odds on trying to cover this up? I wanted to grab every character in this film, the daughter included, and roughly shake them by the shoulders whilst screaming at them to seriously just grow up. Don’t even get me started on the certifiably nuts twist ending that just adds an extra layer of asininity to a narrative with already zero credibility, integrity or realism. I realize that people make dumb mistakes, no one is perfect and situations can get out of hand real quick, but none of that excuses the mockery of human behaviour on display here, it’s like this script was written by.. I dunno man, not a human being with any sense of how people act or function. Avoid at all costs.
-Nate Hill
Podcasting Them Softly 