The Truth Game

The truth will out: hosting dinner parties can be tricky. So too accepting your friends' dinner invitations. As a rule, don't get people together, only monkey business will result. Eddy (Laing) and Lilly (Giles) are a married London couple circling thirty. He's a chummy amateur writer, still dealing on the side, she's plummy and brings home the bacon. That they're happily attached doesn't preclude straying eyes. His friend Dan (Blackthorne) is an abrasive, abusive man of appetites about to put on a piss poor show of cleaning himself up - unsurprisingly, his girlfriend Charlotte (Emery) acts like she can't stand him and she's close to breaking-up point. Then there's Alex (White), and her beau Alan (Fisher), one daffy and gregarious, the other autistic and gauche. They're doing fine with each other, but like everyone else, they've brought a secret to the table. Explosive dinner affrays may not be a cinematic novelty, but Rumley's second feature certainly has the courage of its convictions. It's a raw, frank, eminently naturalistic thumbnail snapshot of how people live with themselves and their intimates, here and now.