White Lie (2019, Yonah Lewis & Calvin Thomas) (Patreon)

62/100

A companion piece to Cantet's Time Out, maintaining a similar respectful distance from someone whose elaborate scam suggests mental anguish that the film declines to elucidate. Granted, there's a more tangible reward involved here—Katie admits at one point that her various GoFundMes have brought in some $24,000—but that hardly seems worth the sheer panic that consumes her at virtually all times. And even if her initial motivation was purely financial (which we can't know, since White Lie, like Time Out, opens with its deceit already in progress), there's clearly something pathological about her refusal to take any of the numerous off-ramps that others laboriously construct for her throughout. While Kacey Rohl's jittery performance can't match Aurélien Recoing's discomfiting opacity, she does a fine job of embodying the habitual liar's shortsighted fixation on just somehow making it through the current crisis, ignoring how many future difficulties the solution is likely to entail. Alas, she gets precious little formal support from Lewis and Thomas, whose joint visual sense is functional at best and borderline inept at worst—they utterly botch the otherwise powerful moment in which Katie stops at the doorway to certain exposure and announces "I don't need to be here," pointlessly withholding a view of the room so that her epiphany at first looks like she merely saw someone (her dad, perhaps) within. Also, Jennifer, Katie's girlfriend, becomes so prominent in the last 15 minutes or so that both the role and their relationship retroactively feel underdeveloped. Still, if you're in the mood to watch someone keep frantically digging a hole she's standing in, even as toxic sewage water floods in to replace every shovelful of earth, here's a movie that'll keep you in a permanent wince.