A good old-fashioned scary story

Thomas Dekker in The Good Lie

Canadian director Shawn Linden’s second feature, The Good Lie (which unfortunately shares a title with a Reese Witherspoon movie to be released later this year), is a clever mash of suspense, horror, comedy and drama. It’s a film that’s overtly about storytelling, but goes about it in a decidedly genre-friendly fashion.

Cullen (Thomas Dekker) leads an expedition of bros to a camping trip in the woods, where his friends take turns telling stories around a campfire while he sits silently brooding. Their stories provide comic relief of the Grand Guignol variety, while breaking up the main narrative of Cullen’s story, which unfolds in flashback. After his mother (Julie LeBreton) dies in a car accident, he discovers that his birth father was a criminal who raped her. Torn up with anger, he goes on a mission to find and confront his real father, which leads him into a dark underworld.

A Manitoba/Quebec co-production, The Good Lie is set in some kind of strange imagined pan-Canadian space featuring prairie-like highways, decidedly Eastern forests, the Farine Five Roses sign and Montreal skyline, and towns with French names but English signs everywhere. Dekker is more of a generic pretty boy than an acting heavyweight, but he gives it his all, and the Canadian supporting cast is strong, from character actor Matt Craven (playing Cullen’s adoptive father, who follows him a step behind to try and keep him out of trouble) to Kimberly-Sue Murray (who Cult MTL recently interviewed about her own project Werewoman) as Cullen’s concerned girlfriend.

I’ve been known to be hard on Canadian films, but something about this one manages to keep it on my good side. Although I personally could have done without the bro-down culture depicted in the storytelling framework, the campfire-story vignettes are a nice break from the angst of the central story, and they also serve to throw a bone (with blood and guts attached) to the horror crowd while the main narrative slowly builds suspense. The story keeps you guessing; it’s not predictable and it cleverly plays with narrative while not trying to be something more than it is. In a national cinematic landscape full of failed experiments and successfully generic crapola, there’s a lot to be said for that. ■

The Good Lie opens Friday, May 3