Rahul Desai
At first glance, School of Lies is a typically solid whodunit. A small-town mystery invites scrutiny onto a place of learning. Suddenly, all those carefully crafted walls of education and care are in danger of crumbling.
Like the people in it, though, there’s more to this series than meets the eye. The kids are more than alright, the visual language is on point, the pace is perfect, but it’s the intricate writing that soon takes centerstage.
Which brings us to the second question: Why do we lie? There’s no clear-cut reason, of course, but School of Lies offers a brilliant psychological flowchart of our times. The short answer is: Because the truth is distant and unsparing. The show’s reading of generational trauma is an updated version of Gehraiyaan.
The film-making does a fine job of conveying the gravity of these themes. Director Avinash Arun Dhaware (Paatal Lok) is a cinematographer by craft, but despite shooting in the hills, not once does he allow the horror atmospherics of the story to hijack its voice.
But some of the red herrings go hand in glove with the characters and their predicaments. The timeline trickery, for example, echoes a child’s non-linearity of emotions. It’s a nice fusion of fact and fable, where the wilderness looks far more expansive and surreal than the bleak chaos of civilization.