It's a bad, bad sign when, while watching a series, you spend most of your time wondering whether it has been appropriately titled or whether the title is sort of misleading. Created by Dorien Goertzen, this seven-episode crime drama mystery on Netflix is called The Perfect Lie in English, though after sitting through all its episodes, you realize that there is nothing "perfect" about any of the lies, especially when most things are pretty clear from the beginning. The fault lies entirely with the myopic characters, who are unable to comprehend the obvious signs of passive-aggressiveness, manipulation, and infidelity. For a viewer, there is little to look forward to once you see through the mechanisms of the story. A generous soul might just sit impatiently until the end, waiting for the characters to catch up with him, which is precisely what I ended up doing. Yet The Perfect Lie is hell-bent on making everybody believe that there is more to it than what's apparent to the eye. You see, it, by hook or by crook, strives to live up to its reputation of dealing with a "perfect lie," and that's something it achieves by... ending on a cliffhanger with the tease that someone did manage to flawlessly fool everybody.
It's a cheap trick—a copout, to be precise. Then again, nothing in The Perfect Lie suggests that it cares what you think about it. This brings me to its original title, which is De Eetclub. It means The Dinner Club, and although the women in the series do initially welcome Karen (Loes Haverkort) into this club by asking her to strip, all I could make of this dinner thing was that it's about all these people occasionally hanging out together to eat, just as a normal group of friends might plan a night out together to have a good time. So... is it really a "club," then? Or did I not get what it means? Does it even need to mean anything? The show, after all, is structured like a crime thriller in which suspects are interviewed one at a time, allowing the real narrative to be constructed through different viewpoints. No, don't say Rashomon, because The Perfect Lie doesn't really play with the notion of who's telling the truth and who's lying. It does flirt with it mildly, but it's mostly about characters not disclosing certain details to the police—details that the show nonetheless reveals to the audience almost instantly.
This means the show has no room for suspense or mystery. All it has is a cheap cliffhanger to make way for a second season or, perhaps, to entice viewers into reading the book by Saskia Noort, which serves as the inspiration for the series. There also exists a 2010 film that tells the same story in 1 hour and 34 minutes, though there's another movie that comes to mind while watching The Perfect Lie. I am referring to Rendez-Vous, starring Haverkort, in which a wife, with her husband and kids, renovates a dilapidated house and starts an affair with a young guy. The name of Haverkort's character in that drama-romance is Simone, and the name of the man with whom her character has an affair in The Perfect Lie is Simon. Moreover, the name of the young guy who sleeps with Simone is Michel, and the name of Karen's husband here is, yes, Michel (Teun Luijkx). There, you now have something to show off during a casual trivia night.
One has to come up with ways to keep oneself entertained while watching The Perfect Lie. It has something to say about children being affected by the complications of the adults around them (a boy picks up a stone and almost hits another kid). It has something to say about women facing severe criticism for being strict in the office. It has something to say about wives who manipulate their husbands because they suffer from psychological disorders. And it has something to say about greed, ambition, corruption, and how a couple must be emotionally synchronized to be perfectly happy. All these points are blended together haphazardly to create threads that jostle with each other for space in The Perfect Lie. They do manage to render the show busy, but not even remotely interesting or worth investing your time in. This crime thriller is simply another bland, yawn-worthy piece of Netflix content. To call it anything else—to hype it up as entertaining—would definitely be a perfect lie.
Final Score - [2.5/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times