In Netflix‘s new Dutch thriller The Perfect Lie, the secrets among a tight-knit friend group come to light after one of them dies in a fire. Yes, it feels like we’ve seen shows like this before.
Opening Shot: A woman walks into a police interview room, takes off her coat and sits down.
The Gist: That woman, Karen (Loes Haverkort), is talking to the police about a fire the night before at the home of her friends Babette (Noortje Herlaar) and Evert (Edwin Jonker). While Babette and her sons made it out, unfortunately Evert died in the fire. During the interview with the police, Karen talks about “The Dinner Club,” a group of four couples that were close friends. It’s a group she joined after Karen, her husband Michel (Teun Luijkx), and their daughter moved to Bergen. She is introduced to the group by her friend Hanneke (Rifka Lodeizen) and her husband Ivo (Remko Vrijdag).
The families in this group are certainly financially well-off, none more so than Patricia (Charlie Chan Dagelet), whose father is loaded, and her husband Simon (Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen). The group is close-knit and seem to all get along with each other — Karen’s “initiation” was to skinny dip in Patricia’s pool. She kept her clothes on — barely — and it seems like there was an attraction between her and Simon. Karen’s description of the months leading up to Evert’s death also seem to indicate that, despite the booze-and-blow-fueled good times the group had, there were lots of secrets that they were keeping from each other.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Dorien Goertzen and based on the novel The Dinner Club by Saskia Noort, The Perfect Lie can fit into the “rich people being awful” genre populated by Big Little Lies, The Perfect Couple, The Undoing, and The White Lotus.
Our Take: There is nothing about The Perfect Lie that we haven’t seen before in this genre: Pretty people in beautiful houses being obliviously callous and nasty to everyone around them and each other. The plot is basically going to involve Karen trying to figure out exactly what happened to Evert and who was responsible. The way the storytelling is structured, though, we’re going to hop back and forth between pre-fire and post-fire timelines, which should show the real dynamic among the eight friends.
We just don’t know how much we care. The first episode tries to establish how close they all were to each other, but basically shows them all acting like no one outside their groups even exist, like when they trespass at the tennis club that rejected Patricia’s membership bid. But the townspeople are all portrayed as people who just react in relation to this group’s shenanigans, and of the four husbands, only two seem to have anything in the way of discernible personalities — and we’re being generous here. We weren’t given enough time to be convinced at the closeness of this group, and we don’t know if what we see from here forward will be any more convincing.
Performance Worth Watching: As the person who’s newest to the group and also the most sensible, Loes Haverkort’s Karen is also the character we want to watch the most, if only because she actually seems to have a soul.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode, but there will probably be some in the other six.
Parting Shot: Hanneke listens to a voice text she left for Evert that said he needs to get rid of Babette.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Perfect Lie is less annoying to us than what we usually see in the “rich people being awful” genre. But what promises to be an intricate thriller is done a disservice by a lack of depth in the storytelling.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company, and elsewhere.