Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *
Cast: Catherine Walker, Emily Reid, Emmett J. Scanlan, Paul Mescal, Eleanor Methven, Ian McElhinney, Shelley Conn, Dempsey Bovell, Louisa Harland, Lloyd Everitt, Cathy-Brennan Bradley, Saffron Coomber, Ciara Berkley, Ava Gallagher, Sophia Adli, Niall Cusack, Vanessa Ifediora, Louise Mathews, Shashi Rami, Catherine Rees, Declan Rodgers, Ethan Yandall, Frank Cannon.
Never trust a writer, they have spent all their life working out how to use their voice to add suspicion and mislead others; such is the finesse in which they have created their characters ability to betray, it is possible to believe everything they say and feel elated when the truth is revealed.
Tobias Beer’s and Lisa McGee’s tale of lies, envy and manipulation, The Deceived, has its roots in every writer’s fear, that someone will steal your work and pass it off as their own. If it is not enough to have the anxiety of whether your words, your ideas, will be taken seriously, but to add the concern of just how those words will be treated by someone you admire, someone you trust, that you love; it is a wonder that any new writing is not met with several cautionary notes and with a waiver of undue pressure attached.
Whilst the actual premise might not exactly be a startling revelation to the viewers who place their deductive skills in this story of murder and ghosts, there is the undeniable pleasure of finding the malignant force of misdirection strewn, woven into the very fabric of how society is willing to treat new artists of any persuasion, with contempt, with suspicion, and sometimes by ripping apart their soul, and for what, recognition, that all important drive which demands of each of us, the chance to delude others that we have become successful.
It is in this realm of manipulation by Emmett J. Scanlan’s Michael Callaghan over his wife Roisin and his unsuspecting girlfriend, Ophelia, played with quite remarkable tension and trepidation by Emily Reid, that the details of Michael’s own deceit is exposed; however as all good liars and writers know, there is always another lie waiting to be unleashed, and as Ophelia struggles to convince others of her sanity and her doubts, so the noose tightens and the scrutiny becomes more fixed around her own involvement in the events of Roisin’s apparent death.
There may be no such thing as ghosts, and yet it is ghosting that cause writers to stare at their keyboard and will their story back to life, to confront the devil in the detail of stolen, even plagiarised, tale.
Unnerving, creepy, a good old-fashioned tale of murder and the ghosts let loose to claim vengeance, The Deceived is a thriller that chills the mind.
Ian D. Hall