Review: The Lie

Director: Veena Sud

Screenplay: Veena Sud

Year: 2020

Blumhouse Productions, the renowned production house specialized in horror cinema, continues its effort to expand its offering of movies and series. Together with Hulu, they have been offering the series “Into the Dark”, which consists of low budget horror movies with topics related to festivities, and here we have reviewed a few of their chapters. Now, Blumhouse joins effort with Amazon to create the series “Welcome to the Blumhouse”, which for the moment consists of four thriller movies that will be released during October.

Jay (Peter Sarsgaard; "Shattered Glass”) takes his daughter Kayla (Joey King; "The Conjuring") to a ballet camp, were on the way, they find her best friend, Britney. After picking her up, Jay has to stop in an isolated area, where Britney disappears. Jay, Kayla, and her mother (Mireille Enos; "World War Z") try to keet the reason for the disappearance a secret, but this has grave consequences.

The first thing I must mention about “The Lie” is that this is not a horror movie. At most, it could be classified as a thriller, but it is really a family drama where every decision has a consequence that complicates more and more the problem. It all unfolded around a horrific event but is a very different product for what we usually get from Blumhouse. 

As a thriller, “The Lie” also fails to stand out. The story from director and screenwriter Veena Sud ("The Salton Sea") achieves being entertaining and maintaining the mystery and the viewer’s desire to find out how this series of intertwined events will end out. However, the script has a series of issues that hinder its enjoyment. 

To start, the way that event that puts the plot in motion happens doesn’t make much sense. Similarly, the protagonist makes a series of decisions that are at the lest illogical and that serve more to manipulate the plot towards a particular path than to make it realistic. This fills the plot with holes and inconsistencies that are impossible to ignore. 

“The Lie” is one of the proposals from Blumhouse and Amazon in their “Welcome to the Blumhouse” series, but that certainly is not its best representative to garner excitement around the series. This thriller unfolds around an interesting event and the sequence of events that happen from there on and manages to make you interested in how it will all be solved. However, the holes and inconsistencies in its script play against it.