Dangerous Lies (2020)

Dangerous Lies arrived on Netflix in April of 2020, a psychological thriller about a young caregiver who inherits her elderly employer's Chicago estate along with the diamonds buried beneath his garden. The plot involves a stolen fortune, a fake real estate agent, a suspicious detective, and a lawyer who turns out to be a co-conspirator. It is competent enough to fill ninety minutes and forgettable enough that those ninety minutes will not linger. The Hollywood Reporter called the logic dumb. Esquire called the whole thing incoherent. Both assessments hold.

The cast is notably diverse. Camila Mendes plays Katie, Jessie T. Usher plays her husband Adam, and Jamie Chung plays the murderous attorney Julia. This is a multiracial ensemble assembled without announcement, and the film never asks us to notice. No character comments on anyone's background. No subplot explores identity. The diversity simply exists, the way it exists in most of the world, and the screenplay moves along to the next dead body. For that restraint, a modest credit is due.

Everything else sits at zero. The film has no interest in gender politics, no interest in class despite its fixation on wealth and inheritance, no environmental concerns, no engagement with queerness, disability, or neurodivergence. Leonard's fortune changes hands and nobody pauses to interrogate the system that produced it. Katie is pregnant in the final scene, which is the closest the film comes to a thesis, and the thesis is that a baby is nice. The diamonds are absurdly large and, as a reviewer at Esquire calculated, roughly the value of a packet of geranium seeds. The sprinklers run. The soil shifts. We are left with a movie that wanted only to entertain and largely failed, which is its own kind of honesty.