Just Lie To Me
2023 · 16m · USA
Directed by Kelly Walker
Genres: dark comedy, drama, romance
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, tender
Bartender Brooke (Kylie Alesso), whose finances are just bad enough, is mistaken for a sex worker by wealthy, newly single consultant Noah (Ian McQuown) — and decides to go along with it for the night. Kelly Walker's 16-minute dark comedy follows the pair's sparring, funny, melancholic conversation as their facades wear away.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Walker sets up the con-job premise—mistaken identity, financial desperation, the whole tired dance—and then just... lets the characters talk themselves into honesty instead of doubling down on the grift. It's almost anti-contrarian in how sincerely it pivots away from the trap it could've sprung.
The film's debt to the two-hander tradition—Linklater's conversational architecture, the rom-com's facade-shedding arc—is worn with clear-eyed awareness; Walker deploys each tonal shift (comic, melancholic, tender) as a deliberate movement through a well-understood form.
The decision to let Alesso and McQuown's sparring gradually *soften* rather than sharpen is what makes this work—there's a specific moment where the banter stops defending and starts confessing, and that single pivot in performance temperature transforms what could've been a surface comedy into something that actually lands.
Reviews
It is funny and sad and sharp, and utterly entertaining. The 16-minute runtime packs in a tight narrative of conflict, vulnerability, and connection—played out almost entirely on Noah's couch—that is as funny as it is touching.