At the heart of Veena Sud’s The Lie is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller. Ex-spouses Rebecca (Mireille Enos) and Jay (Peter Sarsgaard) are nearly comical opposites who’re attempting to share parenting of their teenage daughter, Kayla (Joey King). Rebecca is an attorney living with Kayla in a posh home in a Canadian suburb, and Jay is a middle-aged man who still clings to dreams of making it as a musician. Outside of Jay’s bohemian apartment, the family briefly, awkwardly runs into Jay’s current girlfriend, Trini (Dani Kind), in a lively moment that seemingly encapsulates the tensions of Rebecca and Jay’s divorce in a manner of seconds. Rebecca is advancing her career, while Jay still wants to be a boy at the cost of his ex-wife and daughter’s resentment.
These tensions, particularly Jay’s arrested development, aren’t window dressing, but a direct influence on the calamities that follow. Jay is to drop Kayla off at a weekend-long ballet workshop. On the way, Kayla spots her good friend, Brittany (Devery Jacobs), waiting at a bus stop. This is a chillingly surreal image, as one doesn’t anticipate seeing bus stops out in the middle of the country. Brittany is also going to the workshop, and Jay picks her up at Kayla’s insistence, at which point Brittany begins to flirt with Jay, who doesn’t seem to mind as much as he should. The girls soon ask to use the bathroom in the middle of the woods, and Brittany disappears, with Kayla claiming to have pushed her over a bridge into the frozen water below. Eventually, after being pressed for a motive, Kayla blames Jay and the flirting.
The Lie then becomes a cover-up story, in which Rebecca and Jay reunite to help Kayla evade a murder prosecution. The film, a remake of the little-seen 2015 German film We Monsters by Sebastian Ko, is theoretically a tale of remarriage as brokered by delusional parenting. As Kayla blithely watches TV and cooks breakfast and plays with Dad in the aftermath of Brittany’s murder, Rebecca and Jay continue to believe that their daughter is good and this incident is a fluke that can be purged from their lives. Such assumptions also spring from guilt, as Kayla is usually left to her own devices, especially her phone, while Rebecca and Jay tend to their own lives. Sud establishes this rich subtextual framework succinctly and confidently, and the pairing of Enos and Sarsgaard is a masterstroke of counterintuitive casting—her fraught intensity complementing his intellectualized hipster energy and vice versa.
After a strong first act, though, Sud allows The Lie to sink into a holding pattern. For too long, there simply isn’t much going on in the film, narratively or thematically. The scenario has a potential irony at its core, which Sud essentially ignores: that this atrocity may have reignited Rebecca and Jay’s attraction for one another. Other nasty, potentially satirical implications are also wasted, such as how Kayla’s entitled upbringing has allowed her to treat murder as just another road bump to be walled off from. The Lie wants for a sense of escalation, as we’re too often forced to watch a perfunctory cover-up that’s staged at an over-deliberate, self-consciously prestigious film’s pace. A clever, sadistic twist ends the film on a high note however, confirming that it’s indeed an indictment of helicopter parenting run amok.
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