Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 5/10
Cast: Natalie Dormer, Brendon Daniels, Daniel Schultz, Morgan Santo, Clayton Evertson, Langley Kirkwood, Kiroshan Naidoo, Daniel Janks, Sunny Yoon, Daniah De Villiers, Robert Hobbs, Athenkosi Mfamela, Katlego Lebogang, Ivan Abrahams, Roxanne Prentice, Caely-Jo Levy, Robert Hobbs.
Sex and death go hand in hand, it is a staple of fiction within the crime genre, and in real life when the news reports on the various murders that chastise and upset the nation’s sensibilities, that shock and rightly disgust the morality of the natural world.
How many deaths, male and female are attributed to the act of sexual activity compared to every other possible reason why someone would take another’s life? How many people die because of jealousy, of regret of a relationship, of a kink taken too far, of possession, the list is endless, and when placed against a backdrop of the possibly illicit being found out, of being discovered, the chances are that someone will die because of it.
This is the issue facing the six-part series of White Lies, a narrative that asks the armchair detective to understand the telegraphed agency at the heart of the puzzle, and why sex plays such an enormous part of the tale when racism is treated almost casually, when the lives of one family and their neighbourhood are immersed in such activities, and how the realisation of money can lead to such practices.
It is to be argued that the series suffers under the weight of its own pretension, it asks so much of its cast but painfully, sadly it feels as though the premise put to them was out of reach, and whilst Brendon Daniels offers sympathy as the put upon detective, Forty Bell, the eminently watchable and talented Natalie Dormer commands every scene with a raise of an eyebrow and the sense of untold evil to be found in Morgan Santo’s reading of Jaime McKenzie, the whole of the narrative feels underwhelming, almost limp as it stretches out the conversation, and ultimately the reveal.
It is a despair that a wide range of actors, especially ones with such dramatic hearts and who can offer performances that captivate, should in the end be within an unrealised potential project, that of all the motives that can carry a detective drama, it should be one that has more gravitas than is hinted during the entirety of White Lies.
Ian D. Hall