95 min | R | October 6, 2020 | Amazon Studios
A teenage girl tells her parents she pushed her best friend off a bridge. They decide to protect her instead of calling the police. Every choice they make to cover it up digs the hole deeper, and the film mistakes that hole for suspense.
Kayla Logan confesses to her divorced parents that she killed her friend. Jay and Rebecca, separated and barely speaking, choose loyalty over the law. They lie to the missing girl’s father. They lie to the police. The Lie is not really about a dead girl. It is about two adults who decide their daughter’s life is worth more than the truth, and about how that decision metastasizes into something they cannot control. The premise sets up a moral pressure cooker and then keeps reaching for shocks instead of letting the pressure build.
Peter Sarsgaard plays Jay as a weak man performing competence. He makes phone calls and issues reassurances and you can see the panic leaking through every word. Mireille Enos plays Rebecca with a brittle control that cracks in useful places. She is the one who calculates while Jay flails. Joey King plays Kayla as a sullen cipher, and the performance is the film’s biggest problem. King is asked to be unreadable, and the script never gives her an interior, so her silences register as withholding rather than depth. Cas Anvar, as the missing girl’s father Sam, brings more urgency in a handful of scenes than the leads manage across the whole film.
Veena Sud writes and directs, adapting a German thriller, and her television instincts show. The film is shot in cold blue winter light, all bare trees and gray rivers, and the palette does more work than the script to establish dread. Sud cuts on reaction shots constantly, holding on faces as characters absorb bad news, a technique that builds tension early and curdles into monotony by the midpoint. The score leans on low strings to tell you when to feel afraid. The production design strands the family in a handsome modern house that becomes a kind of glass cage, and that visual idea is sharper than anything the dialogue attempts.
The Lie wants to be a study of how far parents will go and how complicity corrodes a marriage. It gets distracted by its own machinery instead. The plot demands that intelligent people make stupid choices on a schedule, and each escalation asks you to swallow a little more than the last. By the time the film plays its final card, the human story has been sacrificed to the twist. The result is a thriller that confuses people behaving improbably with people under pressure, and it never recovers the difference.