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.
Will the baby-ish-faced detective and reluctant hero find the answers? Will Assemblyman’s daughter Kim Seo-hui (Lee Yoo-young), ascending to her father’s legislator role, discover who killed him? Will Kang require more sushi?
Stay tun(a)ed.
In the final season of Silicon Valley, satire reigns over big tech
Such wisdom never touched the creators of Silicon Valley and we’re all the richer for it. Now streaming on HBO Go, the complete, seven-episode sixth and final series of the bone-dry-funny dissection of the terrors of tech wastes no time in skewering those big bad corporations, with whom we’re all familiar, for their contemptuous attitude to the customers who make them rich.
Thomas Middleditch, as Pied Piper chief executive and founder Richard Hendricks, remains the near-incarnation of a certain social media tycoon; the oily loyalty of Zach Woods, as Jared, to his superior is still nauseating; Martin Starr is thoroughly disconcerting as the monotone system security architect Bertram Gilfoyle; and regularly stealing scenes is Hong Kong’s own Jimmy O. Yang as blunt, uncommunicative app developer Jian Yang.
Silicon Valley has always delighted in lampooning the klutziness of its central crew of self-satisfied anoraks more at home with virtual people than real ones – and what fun that continues to be. This series sees Hendricks called before a Senate committee to explain to a befuddled bunch the workings of his shady-sounding data compression algorithm. He turns a potential embarrassment, or worse, surrounding security lapses and privacy problems into a triumph, promising a democratic, decentralised internet – before falling off his chair.
Nevertheless, the company soon comes under considerable threat, not least from a big-money investor who may be riding a Trojan horse. Will Pied Piper extend its electronic influence over the lives of the faithful and remain free to call its devious tune?
