Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Couple Of Lies’ On Netflix, A Thriller Where Two Couples’ Lives Unravel After They Swap Houses

In A Couple Of Lies, the new Netflix thriller from Sweden, two couples who have never met swap houses, and what they discover in their rented homes reveals all sorts of secrets about people in the other couple.

A COUPLE OF LIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Sunrise over a villa. A man gets in a sports car, starts it, and drives towards a woman lying unconscious in the long driveway.

The Gist: Helene (Frida Gustavsson) and Carl (Fares Fares) are driving towards the villa in Sicily owned by Scarlett (Emma Appleton) and Adam (Jakob Oftebro), who are going to stay in Helene and Carl’s house on an island near Stockholm. The couples have never met; they found each other on a home-swapping website.

Carl and Helene are on a “babymoon,” as Helene is pregnant. He is trying to recover from an incident in one of the hotels he owns, where a combination of stress, overworking and no sleep led him to act out on a guest. He vows he won’t think of work, but his business partner tells him that a local resort owner whom they’ve been after to sell to them is ready to talk. Helene keeps reminding Carl that he visited the house the last time they were in Sicily, to check it out, but Carl does not remember. Then they find a dead rat floating in the pool; as the rat decomposes, Carl finds a ring that might belong to a missing tourist.

Scarlett and Adam find that Carl and Helene’s home is full of active CCTV cameras, and Scarlett is surprised when Silvia (Anna Bjelkerud), their retired police detective neighbor, accidentally-on-purpose enters the house while Scarlett is taking a bath. Scarlett is also dealing with her deadbeat brother Tom (Diarmuid Noyes), who owes people back in Sicily lots of money and wants to get it from her. There is also evidence back at the Sicily house that Adam may have been cheating on her.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? A Couple Of Lies, written by Amanda Högberg and Axel Stjärne and based on Stefan Ahnhem’s novel, has a similar feel to other Scandinavian thrillers like Land Of Sin.

Our Take: There are a few head-scratching decisions in A Couple Of Lies that became difficult to keep from distracting us as we were watching. The first one was having Scarlett — and by extension, her brother Tom — sport bad American accents. The show’s writers wanted so badly to show that Scarlett was American that she’s constantly speaking English in response to everyone’s else’s Swedish. Sure, it’s possible that she understands Swedish better than she can speak it. But it’s a distraction.

Another decision we’re not sure about is how Carl’s cognitive issues are being portrayed. It’s being played off as a product of him not sleeping and working himself to death, but peeing on a customer, forgetting he’s been to places, and other deficiencies show that something else is going on. Does it mean that Helene is gaslighting him and maybe slowly poisoning him as well? Maybe. But it seems that if we were Carl, we would have hightailed it to a doctor at the first lapse of memory we experienced; it’s hard to believe he’s let it go this long.

Still, despite these head-scratching items, A Couple Of Lies is still intriguing because both couples have secrets, and they’re all going to be revealed through this house swap. Not one of the four main characters seem to be particularly innocent, and it’ll be interesting to see how everything unravels as they each stumble upon things that blow others’ secrets wide open.

Performance Worth Watching: Despite her not-great American accent, we still liked watching Emma Appleton as Charlotte because she probably is the most innocent of the four characters, though probably not guilt-free.

Sex And Skin: None of either in the first episode, but there seems like there will be as the series moves along.

Parting Shot: After hearing what he thinks are rats, Carl opens up the well in front of the Sicily house and sees dozens of rats swarming on a decomposing body.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you don’t let some of the clunkier aspects of the show distract you, A Couple Of Lies is an interesting, fast-moving thriller where everyone has something to hide.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.