Compulsive Liar

A compulsive liar whose lies come true. That single line was all Émile Gaudreault brought to his co-writers Eric K. Boulianne and Sébastien Ravary, with no characters and no situations attached. It grew into 'Compulsive Liar', released in Quebec as 'Menteur': his first fantasy comedy, a genre Quebec cinema had barely touched, and the fourth film the 'Mambo Italiano' director made with stand-up comic Louis-José Houde.

Simon Aubert (Houde) is an executive at an aviation company, and he lies out of habit: to explain away every late arrival, to get women into bed, to sound interesting, even to claim his parents mistreated him. His fed-up family and colleagues stage an intervention, and he denies everything. The timing couldn't be worse, because a group of Russian businessmen is flying in to negotiate a deal that could save the plant where his twin brother Phil (Antoine Bertrand) works.

The next morning Simon wakes up in a world where everything he's ever made up is true. His boss France (Geneviève Schmidt) is now a raging drunk, just as the Russians arrive. His parents (Véronique Le Flaguais and Luc Senay) are the monsters he described, his sister-in-law Virginie (Anne-Élisabeth Bossé) is madly in love with him and Phil has become the unluckiest man alive. With his brother and Chloé (Catherine Chabot), the translator hired for the visit, he has to work out how to undo the lies and get his life back.

It opened in Quebec on 10 July 2019 and took around 1.2 million Canadian dollars in its first five days. By the end of its run it had passed 6 million, finished the year as Canada's top-grossing homegrown film and won the Golden Screen Award at the 2020 Canadian Screen Awards. Three Prix Iris nominations followed, among them Revelation of the Year for Chabot. Local critics were mostly warm, though several found the ending predictable. Comparisons with Jim Carrey's 'Liar Liar' were inevitable, but reviewers saw little in common beyond the premise.

The idea has travelled. In France, Olivier Baroux made his own version in 2022, 'Menteur', starring Tarek Boudali. A sequel, 'Menteuse', followed in 2025, built around Virginie and without Houde, and Amazon MGM is developing an American remake with Kumail Nanjiani in the lead, written by Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon.

• Comedy
• Science fiction