When Rape Is a Plot Twist
Liar, a six-part miniseries whose finale airs on SundanceTV on Wednesday, is constructed around the premise that two people are telling different stories about a sexual encounter and one of them is lying. Laura (Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) has no memory of what happened at the end of her date with Andrew (Ioan Gruffudd) and thinks she’s been raped. Andrew insists the sex was consensual, and that Laura’s furious public statements are ruining his reputation. Complicating matters further is that Andrew, a surgeon and single father, is a pillar of the community, while Laura is increasingly unstable, and—it emerges—has a history of making allegations against men that she later retracted.
I’ve watched with increasing queasiness over the past few weeks, amid the rising tide of charges against Harvey Weinstein and similarly powerful men. On the one hand, the British-made what exactly happened in Laura’s flat that night. For most of the first three episodes, obfuscates and confuses the question of whether Laura should be believed when she tells family members and the police that she was raped.
