OTT Review: One Of Us is Lying

In the small-town Bayview High, five high-school students — Simon (Mark McKenna), Addy (Annalisa Cochrane), Cooper (Chibuikem Uche), Bronwyn (Marianly Tejada), and Nate (Cooper van Grootel) — are given detention after school. Of these, Simon, in a ploy borrowed from Gossip Girl, is a gossip monger: he has an app on which he reveals damning campus secrets on a regular basis (of course, in Gossip Girl, the identity of the whistleblower remains a mystery till the final season whereas here we know right from get-go who it is).

Subtext: most students — especially those with deep, dark secrets — hate Simon, who also prides in being some sort of an intellectual boffin. Over the detention period, Simon suffers a sudden and fatal allergic reaction, and dies. The autopsy reveals that the death was not accidental, it was murder, and since there were four other students in the detention room with the victim, one of them has to be the killer. So, we have four clear suspects and motives galore — all four have reasons and more to want Simon to be dead.

One Of Us Is Lying — I’d like to believe the title is a lift from the 1981 ABBA number ‘One of us’ — is based on Karen M. McManus’s 2017 bestselling book of the same name. The first season debuted on Netflix last month, and has already managed to build up quite a following (and there’s a second season coming soon). It’s not difficult to see why: these kinds of ‘bubble’ mysteries — where victims and perpetrators belong in the same brick-and-mortar ecosystem, often feeding off each other in more ways than one — belong to the (Agatha Christie’s) And Then There Were None-type genre. It’s “one of us” who is the killer — and that just adds a heightened dimension.

There are hints of collaborations, and twisted connections formed to those (including teachers and relatives of students) who may not have been present at the crime scene. So, it’s quite a thrill, although the ‘grown-up’ and strident tonality of the characters may be slightly disturbing. OTT networks have been blamed for projecting school kids in a not-so-flattering light: these are not the kind of confused yet lovable ‘kids’ we watched in movies like Grease; these are more like unapologetic adults with full-blown dark sides. Not once did I get the sense that this is not a bunch of 40-year-olds.

sushmita@khaleejtimes.com

• Dubai