‘We Were Liars’ review: soapy rich-kids holiday thriller heralds a ‘Spoiled Brat Summer’

Summer’s here, so what better time to watch beautiful, awful rich people doing terrible things to each other in exotic locations. If The White Lotus and Sirens arrived too early, the long-awaited Amazon adaptation of E. Lockhart’s young-adult bestseller comes just in time for poolside binge-watching. We Were Liars might be too long, too self-serious and trying far too hard to be Saltburn pushed through the same filter Sabrina Carpenter used for her ‘Espresso’ video, but it’s still a fun teen vacation thriller with an emo heart.

Who wouldn’t want to spend the next few months with the Sinclairs in their mansion on Martha’s Vineyard? This is where Cady (Emily Alyn Lind, Gossip Girl) holidays every year with her cousins Johnny (Joseph Zada, soon to star in The Hunger Games: Sunrise On The Reaping), Mirren (Babygirl‘s Esther McGregor) and family friend Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) AKA the Liars. The mums (Caitlin FitzGerald, Mamie Gummer, Candice King) are all money-grabbing, desperate, resentful drunks while the granddad (David Morse) mostly just glares at everyone from a balcony – but the kids are better than all that.

Cady has a crush on Gat, and that’s all anyone has to worry about in their rich, blonde, island paradise – until Cady wakes up on a beach, covered in blood, with no memory of how she got there. The story plays out in two timelines (Cady helpfully dyes her hair brunette in one so we can tell them apart) as secrets get spilled, boys get kissed, bougie lunches get eaten and the past inevitably starts to creep into the present.

Being that the twist ending of the original book traumatised an entire generation of teenage readers, most will already know what’s coming. If you don’t, you’ll guess anyway since subtlety isn’t the language We Were Liars speaks. There are wall-to-wall pop bangers soundtracking every scene, completely unnecessary voice-over narration and over-wrought big reveal moments closing every episode in pretty much the exact same way (“Wait… am I starting to remember something bad?!”)

The kitschiness keeps the darkness away, but the young cast still manage to sell the sweet and sad bits well enough for us to keep on caring about them. It’s just a shame it all runs about twice as long as it probably should with eight drawn-out, hour-long episodes.

Given a tighter edit, We Were Liars could have easily sharpened up its subtext a bit too. This isn’t exactly Succession, but the soft jabs at wealth and power land nowhere. That doesn’t stop the creators from trying though (“Ever since you came back from India you’ve been obsessed with the evils of colonisation!”), and a show this padded with luxury is crying out for someone to rip it all up.

We Were Liars isn’t here to start a revolution though. This is a soppy teen romance with a guilty conscience. It’s I Know What You Did Last Summer meets Gossip Girl. It’s a great advert for having money and it’ll probably earn Amazon enough dosh to green-light a second series.

‘We Were Liars’ is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video from June 18

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