Film Review: The Good Liar (2019)

One Sir, One Dame, one heck of a thriller bedecked with twists and turns. Dame Helen Mirren and Sir Ian Mckellen, two stalwarts of British acting, play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse in director Bill Condon’s The Good Liar. The film begins in a faintly Hitchcockian manner, with the opening titles comprising the typewritten names of cast and crew on a half-lit parchment background juxtaposed with the present day shots of Betty (Mirren) and Roy (McKellen) curating their online dating profiles and conversing over their laptops, all against the backdrop of Carter Burwell’s understated tension-building music, which is reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Basic Instinct, as well as, naturally, the work of Bernard Herrmann. The beginning of the film shows Betty and Roy meeting for their first date in a restaurant and engaging in old-timer badinage.

Despite the innocence of their first encounter, we soon discover that Roy is not all he seems, a ruthless wheeler-dealer with a chequered past whose raison d’être, and that of his dubious associates, is monetary gain. With the help of partner-in-crime Vincent (Downton Abbey‘s Jim Carter) posing as his financial adviser, they conspire to steal all of Betty’s money through the ruse of setting up a joint account amalgamating her money with Roy’s. However, not all goes to plan, and Betty’s supposed grandson, Steven (Russell Tovey) uncovers murky details of Roy’s historic activities in war-torn Berlin which will inextricably bind Roy and Betty in a way that you couldn’t imagine.

Without revealing too much, the dénouement revolves around a subject matter which is very timely in the media and reminded me very much of Coralie Fargeat’s bloodthirsty feminist thriller, Revenge, in which the “male gaze” is well and truly subverted. Moreover, the screenplay for The Good Liar by Jeffrey Hatcher is one of the best I’ve heard in a long while, with its wittiness reminding me of Mirren and McKellen’s early tenures in the theatre performing Shakespeare. This is insistent viewing, with McKellen looking sprightly on screen at the grand age of 80, and Mirren still possessing that all-time beauty which appears to defy her slightly younger age. They can certainly still give modern-day acting initiates a run for their money.