Telling Lies - Film Review

Directed by Simon Ellis

When we watched Telling Lies in our first lecture I was thoroughly stunned and amused by the film. Not only was it a great concept, the film style complimented it so well and it was made brilliantly, adding to the overall experience.

Telling Lies is a short film where we hear one man’s phone conversations after a night out. However, the twist is that there are animated words which show the distinction between thought and speech. For example, at one point in the film the main character is asked when he split up with his girlfriend and he says “last night at the club”, but the text reads “none of your business”. As the man slowly remembers his antics from the night before, and faces more and more phone calls, his frustration and lies are shown on screen by the animated text. The film progresses with the main character being disturbed by prying phone calls from his mother, his ex-girlfriend phoning to make him jealous because he left with another woman, and then finally the woman he slept with phoning saying that she didn’t want to see him anymore.

The film is very comical because although we are not able to see the character’s emotions, we are able to hear their tone of voice and the animated text very cleverly captures their moods and emphasises them further. The colour and style of the typography is used to show his growing anger and lies. Simple little lies are represented in white text, suggesting it’s a simple “white lie”, while as he gets angrier and yells the text changes to red. While these seem like simple or insignificant points on their own, in context of the film they add great meaning to what is happening.

Overall the film works very well, it’s very much based on a simple, everyday happenings, therefore there is no music used in the film as it does not need any. The most important part of the film is the relationship between the speech and the visual text. The text is animated in such a way that no other visuals are needed and overall it has worked very well.