Liar
2015 · 15m
Directed by Neil Triffett
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
On a first date, a man charmed by a pathological liar follows her home and watches her stories of orphaned childhoods and a body in the basement blur into danger.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The sick joke here is that we're supposed to be charmed by the same lies that should terrify us—Triffett locks you in the seduction before the basement door opens, and by then you're complicit. It's a premise that actively resists what a thriller 'should' do, and it works precisely because it refuses to pick a side.
The tonal architecture is disciplined and deliberate: the film sits at the intersection of romantic comedy mise-en-scène and genuine menace, each genre signal undermining the last with surgical precision. It's the kind of formal control that reads as effortless but demands meticulous construction.
The single masterstroke is the decision to never quite let us know which lies matter—Triffett keeps the camera close on her face during the stories, and that intimacy is the entire film, because we *want* to believe her even as the premise tells us not to. That one choice of framing does all the work.