Blumhouse is celebrating Halloween this year on Amazon Prime Video with four scary movies for the holiday season.
The first two arrived on October 6 with The Lie and Black Box, and the next two hit one week later on October 13 with Evil Eye and Nocturne.
All four movies promise fresh tales of horror from the company that brought the world Paranormal Activity, Sinister, and Get Out.
Here is a look at the first of the four new Blumhouse horror movies arriving on Prime Video this month – The Lie.
There is the thought that the end of a movie either dooms or saves any horror movie. A great movie with a bad ending will almost always go down as a disappointment. An average movie with a great ending will find people appreciating the film even more.
The Lie is a horror movie that falls into that second camp.
This is a story of helicopter parenting, and it asks the viewer what they would do to save their child.
Joey King (The Kissing Booth) is Kayla, a teenage girl whose close friend Brittany (Devery Jacobs) disappears. That is when Brittany’s dad shows up at Joey’s mother’s house looking for her.
Brittany’s dad said his daughter was going to a weekend-long ballet workshop and was supposed to be with Kayla. However, mother Rebecca (Without Consent’s Mireille Enos) tells him she has not seen Brittany and kept Kayla home sick.
However, what really happened was that father Jay (The Killing’s Peter Sarsgaard) was driving Kayla to the ballet camp when they found Brittany at a bus stop on the side of the road. They offer her a ride, but part of the way there, the girls ask to go to the bathroom in the woods, and he allows it.
However, Kayla screams for help, and when Jay rushes out, Brittany is gone. Kayla admits that she pushed Brittany into the cold water below the bridge she is sitting on, and when Jay rushes into the water, he can’t find the body.
This is where the horror begins.
Jay and Rebecca are divorced, but they bond once again as they try to figure out a way to protect their daughter from murder charges. As they do this, Brittany’s frantic father is trying to find his daughter and knows the divorced couple is hiding something.
The parents’ reconnection follows the fact that they know their daughter did something evil and she doesn’t even seem phased.
It is easy to see the girl as a sociopath as she seems oblivious to the pain around her and would rather just happily play on her phone as her parents slowly go crazy around her.
These two adults seem oblivious to their daughter’s actions, don’t ask the right questions, and seem more than willing to get blood on their hands to make sure that they do what they can to protect their little girl.
Even as these two people fall apart on the inside (and Mireille Enos delivers a masterclass on falling apart in this movie), they can’t seem to see the forest for the trees.
What would you do to make sure your daughter didn’t go to prison for murder?
The Lie was originally premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, and Amazon picked it up to stream on Prime Video, for a release this year.
It is also a remake of a 2015 German film called We Monsters by Sebastian Ko. Ironically, that film also debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival three years prior in 2015. This remake moves the action from snowy Germany to snowy Canada.
The movie is a slow burn horror, with the broken family growing back together again instead of falling apart – a switch for these sorts of horror tales.
The end is what really brings this tale from a slow burn average story of people trying to salvage their family into something darker and more disturbing.
What hurts the most is that the comments from their daughter Kayla at the end shows what the movie was meant to present – that covering up a murder is what reignites the love between a couple that was torn apart. If the film had taken the time to delve more into this story in the middle of the movie, it might have hit harder.
Despite that misstep, the film has a very sadistic and clever twist at the end, and the dialogue by Kayla to her parents drives the point home that as much as they wanted to helicopter parent their daughter, they didn’t give her what they needed most and it likely destroyed all of them.
The movie is an average horror movie and below the level of most Blumhouse horror offerings, but that ending makes this one worth the watch if you have Prime Video.