The Good Liar (2019)

December 3, 2019 12:02 PM

Career con artist Roy Courtnay can hardly believe his luck when he meets well-to-do widow Betty McLeish online. As Betty opens her home and life to him, Roy is surprised to find himself caring about her, turning what should be a cut-and-dry swindle into the most treacherous tightrope walk of his life.
posted by Clustercuss (3 comments total)

Good movie and it seems like part of a little trend for small scale old fashioned movies for grown ups which I enjoy.

I felt like at the end I liked Betty as a person so much I was like geez Lily can we chill on trashing Betty so much, she was fine, we're all just doing our best and that's enough, even if she didn't have a lovely castle and her boobs out all the time.

Also in my fanfic young Lily actually kneed him in the balls and he never got to do the assault, making the message of the movie "You come after me, I'm gonna gitcha, you come after my family, I'm gonna gitcha again". I'm just so over every strong female character needing to have this as a character development plot point.
posted by bleep at 1:48 PM on December 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

I also had a negative reaction to the situation that put this whole thing in motion. Somehow the line "and then he saw my sisters" had me groaning. It was just so hammy. It seemed like they were trying so hard to deliver "the big secret" that they lost a sense of...I don't know...reality, believability, something. I also had issues with how the mother didn't know what had happened to Lilly. It seems to me there would be some pretty visible evidence of the act that a young girl would have a hard time covering up in that type of household.

You're right, bleep, the disdain for Betty and her kind of life was also off-putting.
posted by sardonyx at 4:10 PM on December 3, 2019

I finally got around to seeing this on an airplane and I must admit to being slightly disappointed in the twist - which turned out to be an uneasy combination of obvious and completely unbelievable. McKeller and Mirren are both such watchable actors, in fact all the cast is great, but even they couldn’t make that left-field denouncement more plausible.
posted by AndrewStephens at 3:36 PM on August 21, 2021