What a view | The Lies Within on Netflix: an appealingly off-kilter South Korean mystery thriller
- A detective becomes reluctantly embroiled in a tale of political skulduggery, kidnapping and murder
- Plus, Silicon Valley’s final season lampoons the tech industry and those who work in it with trademark aplomb
Gosh, aren’t detectives looking so young these days? Take Jo Tae-sik (played by Korean actor, singer and model Lee Min-ki), lead sleuth on the case in The Lies Within, a Netflix tale of political skulduggery, kidnapping and murder.
That unholy trinity make for easy bedfellows, so no surprises there, but there’s something about this mystery-thriller, now streaming in its 16-part, first-season entirety on Netflix, that is appealingly off-kilter.
A young woman takes an apparently suicidal dive off a building, leaving a crater in the roof of an expensive car. Jo’s deadpan captain Yoo Dae-yong (Lee Jun-hyeok) wonders if the insurance company will pay for the car. Jo’s female colleague Kang Jin-gyeing (Kim Si-eun), meanwhile, goes on a hysterical, drunken bender when she learns that Jo, her idol, is proposing to leave the Seoul police and has to be placated with sushi.
Such jarring black comedy, if that’s what it is, brings a breath of fresh irony to an investigation that spreads like an expanding bloodstain. National Assembly member and presidential candidate Kim Seung-cheol (Kim Jong-soo) swerves his car off the road and loses out to a concrete wall: a second murder that could be suicide.
Add to that the evidence of what looks like yet another killing and it’s little wonder that an unsympathetic Jo, who has no truck with people directing themselves to an early exit, has requested a transfer to the serenity of the law-abiding countryside.
And it’s little wonder there’s no chance of his actually being posted there as he is sucked deeper into an increasingly complex case.
