[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Truth"

The characters in "The Truth" are all actors and staff for a theater company. For the audiences, they perform a sorrowful tale of love and loss. But the minute they get backstage, or are just among themselves, the characters in this film turn to immediate vicious back-biting at the slightest provocation. They're mean bullies with absolutely no self-awareness. And yet, as actors, they think themselves in possession of some profound truth and wisdom behind the way the world really works.

There's laughable humor in these kinds of horrifically disgusting people. At one point one of the actors makes a strong dramatic statement about the inherently nihilistic and hopeless nature of the world. What's astonishing is that this person isn't even trying to rationalize personal repulsive behavior. It's just a simplistic ideal about an inherent nature of the world that ignores personal agency. No one in this film can reasonably claim to be ignorant of the vicious bullying that goes on. Any time evidence arises stating as such, it's simply dismissed as being the manifestation of some other person's inherently selfish desire.

Horror film protagonists are often stupid in the way that they make bad decisions. The cast of "The Truth" is relatively unique in that they're not idiots just for the sake of the story. They're completely incurious, negative-minded cynics who rather than express concern for someone getting mysteriously injured or killed, just jeer and mock that person's perceived weaknesses and selfishness. The relationships in this film are pathetic, piecemeal, and inherently degrading. By far they make up the most interesting part of the narrative.

While the characterization is top-notch, the actual story is awful. A mystery is set up some time into "The Truth". It seems to have a simple solution, as does the event that immediately follows it...and that's exactly all there is to it. The ending isn't predictable, but that's only because the movie arbitrarily hides important clues until the climax. The mystery could have been solved almost immediately by a police detective just checking everybody's alibi. Apparently this was just too much trouble, even though a specific point is made of the police going to the trouble of taking one character into custody completely.

Similarly, it seems like we're supposed to be getting a sense of comeuppance as the movies crawls into more horrific paths. One scene stands out where a character is punished brutally in a way that directly connects to unrecognized personal sin. This is never followed up on. The exact disfiguration isn't important, and later victims aren't even really disfigured at all. Literal punishment is prioritized over thematic punishment, which is a huge cheat. The main part about these awful people worth watching is their sociopathic tendencies. In the end, they're all defined by boring mainstream emotions that really don't get across just how awful they really are.

"The Truth" is not a good movie. It has plenty of interesting, innovative ideas, but the movie doesn't understand why these ideas are interesting, so it just ends up retreading very dull genre ground instead. The result is a fairly big disappointment. Sociopathic characters are common comedic fodder these days, and a very effective statement could be made from a film that exposes "wacky" sociopathic behavior as just being cruel and vicious out of context. As it is, "The Truth" is an opportunity squandered.