The internet has become a way for elders, with spouses dead and children gone, to slip the bonds of isolation and meet people their own age for companionship, even partnership. The Good Liar opens with the initial online encounters between two elderly strangers, Roy (Ian McKellen) and Betty (Helen Mirren). Already, they’re lying as they answer the menu of questions. Drinker: NO, she clicks while sipping a glass of wine. And when they finally meet for lunch, they reveal the truth: they both used false names online.
Soon enough comes the suspicion: The Good Liar is not a romantic comedy but a mystery thriller—maybe even a murder mystery. In an early sign of where it’s going, Roy’s twinkle easily turns stony and his winning smile flattens to a grimace. Turns out he’s deep into dodgy business schemes involving dubious foreign investors and Caribbean banks. He’s a grifter conning other grifters, but he’s not above robbing the innocent. When Betty mentions paying cash for her new car, he gets the idea to swindle her of her life savings.
The Good Liar is set in 2009 London. The significance of the year is that the World War II generation was still lucid and ambulatory in large numbers. Roy and Betty were teenagers in the 1940s. They catch Inglorious Basterds in a cinema, a foreshadow and not the last we’ll hear of that war. Also significant: Betty recently retired after 40 years teaching history at Oxford. Past events determine a plot that turns by gears of deception rotating within wheels of deceit.
If the plot is as intricate and ultimately hard to believe as most mystery thrillers on BritBox, like the “Endeavours” and “Poirots” from the small screen, the story is elevated by the sterling cast. McKellen is a charmer, covering Roy’s dark moral vacuum with an ornate façade of courtly English manners and even the appearance of emotional vulnerability. Mirren endows Betty with a life’s worth of responses. Her face lights up with uncertainty, anticipation, hope, happiness, disappointment and reticence; with equal agility she handles witty repartee and—it turns out—steely resolve. Betty has almost as many secrets as Roy.
