White Lie is a brilliant drama movie about a girl who seems to have cancer. When I first started to watch the movie without taking a look at the trailer, I thought it was a classic movie about cancer and disappointment and sad hospitals visits and the damage cancer does to patients and their loved ones. Boy, I was wrong. The surprise came after a few minutes when I realized that Katie Arneson (Kacey Rohl), the main character, didn’t have cancer at all. I was shocked, I was expecting a lot of pity and cry but I realized in a few minutes that this was indeed an interesting story about scamming and faking cancer for monetary purposes.
One aspect of the movie I liked is that the acting was really good. Rohl’s acting was very powerful, especially in the scenes where she was crying. When Katie was crying after dinner with her girlfriend’s parents, it felt so real and powerful. Sadness and hopelenesses exuded from the scene. I really appreciated the character development Rohl portrayed. It wasn’t a good character development, the character went further into the mud but it was real. The scene where she spoke with one of her friend’s mom who is a lawyer was one of them. She was speaking firmly that she wasn’t faking anything but then as the conversation went on, she became less confident and we could her shield breaking slowly; her eyes said “I’m faking cancer”. The last scene where she spoke with her girlfriend Jennifer (Amber Anderson) also showed her desperation for love, and validation. She was a strong cancer faker at the beginning, at the end she became so low that she confessed to her girlfriend that she was faking it while crying and thought she would be with her and marry her. In addition, I want to say that I really liked Katie’s girlfriend’s Jennifer’s (Amber Anderson) accent. My native language is not English so it’s always nice to hear different accents.
Another aspect I liked about the movie is that we don’t know some things. We don’t know how Katie got into this cancer-faking thing, we don’t know what were the specific circumstances and causes that led her to embark on this. We know from her father’s account that she is indeed a pathological liar. We get that it is related to scholarships and universities but the screenwriters let us imagine the rest . What or who gave her this idea? How did this start? How and why does Owen help her? These questions remain unanswered in my part, and I can only imagine.
I really like little details that make a movie realistic. This movie fortunately gave that feeling. The wrinkles on Katie’s head, small flaws present in her face when she was shaving her head at the beginning… These kinds of details are really important to me otherwise I feel like I’m watching a runway show. Other movies/Tv shows lack that real aspect, everything is perfect but this movie has that realness and I like it.
Interestingly, this movie reminded me of Gypsy Blanchard and her mom. Blanchard’s mom was psychologically disturbed in the sense that she was making her daughter get surgeries and make her look sick even though she wasn’t and she collected a lot of money with that.
Consequently, I really liked this movie. I recommend it to everyone who wants to watch a movie about cancer in a different light.
