Telling Lies

Synopsis

A former NSA contractor sits down with a stolen hard drive of secretly recorded video calls spanning two years of four intertwined lives: a federal agent under deep cover, his wife, an activist, and a cam performer. Each clip shows only one side of a conversation, so the viewer must hunt down the matching half of every call by searching the words people actually said, watching intimacy, deception, and surveillance collapse into each other across roughly ten hours of footage. Sam Barlow's follow-up to Her Story swaps a single actress for a Hollywood cast, Logan Marshall-Green, Kerry Bishé, Alexandra Shipp, and Angela Sarafyan, and a 240-plus page script co-written with Mr. Robot's Amelia Gray, published by Annapurna Interactive. Like its predecessor it does not branch; the investigation order is the story you get, and the uncomfortable intimacy of watching people lie to the ones they love is the point.

How the Branching Works

Telling Lies does not branch: the footage is fixed, and the interactivity is the investigation itself. You choose what to search for and which clips to watch, so the order in which the story assembles is yours alone. With 300 minutes of footage to explore, two viewers can walk away having watched almost entirely different films on the way to the same ending.

Cast & Creators

Related Interactive Films

Further Reading