by Hudson Moura
With Menteuse, Émile Gaudreault returns to the comic universe he knows best: ordinary Québécois characters whose small, everyday distortions of truth spiral into full-blown metaphysical chaos. The film is openly conceived as a sister-piece to his hit Menteur (2019), in which Simon, a compulsive liar, lied so excessively that he literally cracked the fabric of the universe and his inventions became reality. This time, Gaudreault shifts the centre of gravity to someone close to that first film: Virginie, played with exuberant ease by Anne-Élisabeth Bossé, and her partner Phil, played by Antoine Bertrand — two of the most recognizable faces in contemporary Québec comedy. The result is not a simple remake, but a gendered variation on the same high-concept premise: what happens when a woman whose lies are part survival mechanism, part social lubricant, part self-delusion, is suddenly forced to live inside every single thing she blurts out?
Virginie “lies like the wind.” At first, they are what her exasperated entourage calls des petits mensonges blancs: to avoid an awkward family dinner, to flatter a colleague, to dodge a responsibility. But, as Phil reminds her, they are getting “de moins en moins blancs.” Crucially, Phil used to be Simon’s best friend — so he has seen this movie before, and he refuses to be dragged into another reality meltdown. He gives her an ultimatum: stop lying. She can’t. And, as in Menteur, the universe starts to react: each new lie creates another fracture in an already fractured multiverse, pushing the film from domestic comedy to cartoonish fantasy.
Gaudreault doubles down on the absurdism. Tibetan envoys — monk-like “repairers” of reality — are dispatched to find the source of the disturbance and “bring the liar back to her first lie.” It is a knowingly silly device, but it does two things very well. First, it gives the film its comic engine: the pleasure is in watching Virginie’s offhand, sometimes mean, sometimes insecure inventions take shape on screen — metaphors literalized, throwaway lines embodied, exaggerations rendered as set-pieces. Second, it allows the director to comment, lightly, on the contemporary obsession with “truth,” “authenticity,” and, yes, “woke” debates. One of the running gags — Virginie recoded as a kind of bimbo inside this moralized universe — is genuinely funny because it exposes how quickly social categories are weaponized once reality becomes programmable.
The comedy also works because of the ensemble. With stalwarts like Rémy Girard, Pierrette Robitaille, Véronique Le Flaguais, and Martin Drainville, Gaudreault can stage farce without losing warmth. Everyone knows the rhythm of Québec mainstream comedy: quick turns, slightly theatrical dialogues, affectionate mockery of generational and cultural differences. Here, that tradition is alive. Bossé in particular balances silliness and pathos — we laugh at Virginie’s compulsions, but we also see that lying has become her survival kit in a world whose “ideal” version keeps shifting beyond her reach. She lies not (only) to manipulate, but to inhabit a reality where she is more admired, more loved, more protected.
If there is a limit, it is the same one that haunted Menteur: the more the film multiplies lies-become-reality, the more it risks becoming a sketch machine. The Tibetan emissaries, the multiverse “going to bang big,” the escalating visual gags — all of that is fun, but it can thin the emotional through-line. The couple’s problem (Phil wants a grounded life, Virginie cannot stop performing) sometimes gets buried under the conceptual fireworks. And the film does not fully interrogate the most interesting question it raises: what if lying is not moral failure, but misaligned imagination? Nevertheless, the film knows its audience and delivers to it: a high-energy, good-natured, very Québec comedy built on a premise spectators already loved. 
Rating: 3.5/5
The film will be screened at Cinéfranco: Francophone International Film Festival 