We Were Liars Review: a haunting summer of fragments, fire, and fragile truths

From the very first frame, We Were Liars opens in a murmur that vibrates beneath the skin. There’s a sense that every silence carved into the narrative carries music too deliberate to fade into the background. We Were Liars surges forward with a soundtrack that absorbs the weight of things left unsaid. In another show, these might be quiet scenes; here, they are filled with strings, echoes, distorted voices, and elegiac melodies that seem to remember something the characters cannot.

The standout moment arrives with a haunting rendition of Where Is My Mind, a classic reimagined for a generation raised on repressed truths and curated façades. Its inclusion evokes Fight Club, but with a softened devastation, less explosive, more internal. A drowning, not a detonation.

The structure of We Were Liars follows the rhythm of Cadence’s fractured memory. Time blurs. Summers collapse into one another. One moment, she’s dancing on the edge of love and rebellion, the next, she’s washed ashore, empty and unnamed.

The summer of Sixteen lingers in golden tones, all parties and whispered betrayals, while the summer of Seventeen casts everything in blue, clinical, sterile, and deeply unreal. In this space, meaning unravels slowly. Cady’s voiceover releases fragments.

“One becomes a criminal. Another becomes needy. One becomes an addict.”

These aren't metaphors. They're warnings. Pieces of a larger mosaic cracking from within. And in the midst of it all, a mother who obeys a doctor's instruction: say nothing. Let the silence hold. Let her forget.

Lynchian light, curated smiles

In We Were Liars, beneath the privilege and primness of Beechwood Island lies a cinematic language drawn from the world of David Lynch. The light feels artificial. Memory unfolds as half-dream, half-prison. Scenes stretch and shimmer. Shadows cling to the edges. Hallways seem to breathe. Conversations slip away unresolved. Smiles last too long. And a quiet distortion seeps through it all.

Mood saturates everything. Each element invites the viewer to sense the imbalance of a world curated to be flawless. That tension deepens with every clipped sentence and every perfect image that hides the sickness underneath. Every frame seems to ask: how much beauty can a place hold before it starts to rot?

The architecture of denial

The symmetry between Summer Sixteen and Summer Seventeen is deliberate, and devastating. We Were Liars uses repetition not for comfort, but for confrontation. The island shifts into its own mirror, the spaces that once held desire and invention returning stripped of warmth, rebuilt as a mausoleum for appearances. The rituals remain, but their meanings erode. The performances tighten. Each beat of the present mirrors something that came before, now hollowed out and heavy with what no one dares to name.

This story in We Were Liars moves in circles. The characters revisit the same spaces, the same gestures, discovering the weight of what no longer fits. The contrast between the summers reveals no progression, only staging. Control replaces memory. Reenactment replaces truth. The past glows and fractures. The present drifts in careful lines.

In between stands Cady, pulled through it all, memory pressing against the edges of her silence. Her collapse emerges not as symbol, but as consequence, the slow unraveling of a body that has carried too much for too long.

Rituals of affection, cycles of collapse

Within the golden haze of Summer Sixteen, the Liars shine with a kind of tragic radiance. Johnny is all charisma and mischief, Mirren glows with soft rebellion, and Gat walks the line between warmth and wariness. Their bond with Cadence moves like ritual in the narrative of We Were Liars, jumping from roofs into the ocean, spinning stories on mattresses under the stars, creating a kingdom built on nicknames, invention, and defiance. Yet even then, the cracks are beginning to show.

Cady finds a letter Gat wrote to his girlfriend, carefully folded with a flower pressed inside. The romantic tension between them flickers with a charge that never settles, as if their connection might ignite something too powerful to contain. Mirren watches everything. Johnny hides behind jokes. And at least in his case, there’s a quiet relief in how We Were Liars treats his attraction to boys as something ordinary, neither concealed nor sensationalized.

The adults orbit above, each chasing approval from the patriarch who holds the deed to everything they stand on. We Were Liars forgives no one.

What no one names

When Summer Seventeen arrives, the entire island feels gutted. Clairmont, once the heart of the Sinclair legacy, has been remade. In its place stands New Clairmont, a structure that echoes with coldness.

The fractured stories unfold in the screen to our astonishment. We Were Liars does not forgive. Cady returns changed, her hair darker, her body heavier, her movements slower. The others welcome her, but something remains just beyond reach. They dodge questions, exchange glances, obey unspoken rules. Her mother insists this is what the doctors advised. No reminders. No truth. Just softness and control.

But Cady feels the pressure mounting. Her body stores what her mind cannot name. She collapses. She clutches old letters. She senses that something terrible happened, and no one will say what. The silences in We Were Liars are sculpted to preserve a family image that no longer fits its fractured reality.

The island itself conspires in silence. Every bright surface reflects absence. Every friendly gesture seems rehearsed. The Liars still gather, still laugh, still swim, but the energy has changed. It is no longer joy. It is maintenance. A performance of normalcy draped over an unspoken wound. We Were Liars leans into that discomfort without offering release.

Cady’s pain rises in flashes, not as memories, but as symptoms. And the story told in We Were Liars begins to make room for the larger weight Gat carries, being always present but never belonging. His presence in that house, at those dinners, inside that world of old money and polished cruelty, is a reminder of what Beechwood allows to enter but never fully embrace.

Through all of it, We Were Liars maintains a chilling elegance: beauty without safety, youth without shelter, grief shaped by fragments rather than revelation. In We Were Liars, guilt gathers slowly, in the spaces where memory once lived.

We Were Liars - After the fracture

The cracks deepen across both timelines. In the present, Summer of Seventeen, Cady begins to remember more than they expected, not through whispers or confessions, but through textures, flashes, pressure points. She knows Johnny lied. Not just about the past, but about himself. She can’t unsee it. And when she confronts him, the shame detonates. What unravels is not just a friendship, but a system. Johnny is watched, judged and exposed. The secret burns through him, and when Carrie sees the truth on his phone, the weight of all those generations of control shatters in her chest. She cancels the wedding. She drops the performance. What remains is a mother who no longer knows how to protect her son.

The atmosphere suffocates. Cady collapses. The memory, the rage, the heat, the pressure, all of it pulls her body to the ground. Penny clings to control with brittle hands, hiding heirlooms, watching debts rise and relationships rot. Bess confesses she’s been stripped bare by her husband, both emotionally and financially. The illusion of Sinclair invincibility unspools thread by thread.

The last breath of Summer Sixteen

Meanwhile, in the past, Summer of Sixteen, the performance was still intact, but the rot had already begun. Johnny had reasons to lie. The funeral of Tipper hangs over the island like a curtain of smoke. Everyone smiles through their teeth. Gat ends his relationship with Raquel, not in anger, but with a sense of inevitability. The romance with Cady becomes undeniable, no longer held back by distance or guilt. Their closeness grows more intimate, but also more volatile. Amid the chaos, Mirren kisses the water taxi driver. No fanfare. No scandal. Just a girl claiming something for herself in the wreckage. It's brief, almost dreamlike, a tiny act of agency that floats above the ruins. There’s something quietly rebellious in it, not because it shocks, but because it doesn’t. She doesn't ask permission. She doesn’t need to. In the kingdom of secrets and curated perfection, it’s one of the few moments that feels alive.

The weight of the fire

The fire burns at the center of everything. It begins as rumor, then memory, then revelation. It spreads across timelines, peeling back the pristine façades of Beechwood to reveal what Cadence did. She set the fire herself. Drunk. Grieving. Lost in rage and righteousness. The dogs died. Her friends died. It wasn’t an act of justice. It was a mistake that became permanent. And We Were Liars never flinches from that truth.

The island carries that weight in every corner. The reconstruction is not healing. It’s branding. A legacy stapled back together with marble countertops and indoor pools. Cadence walks through New Clairmont like a ghost of her own making. Her family forgives her because they must.

Cadence committed the crimes of involuntary manslaughter, animal cruelty resulting in death, and arson. Her privilege is what allowed her to walk away unpunished. She gets away with that because punishment would stain the family's name too directly. And so her survival becomes its own curse. She remains. The others do not.

The story told in We Were Liars closes not with closure, but with something colder, while hints to stories from a mom's past yet to be told. The final scenes extend beyond the emotional climax, layering explanations that only dilute what the silence already carried. The ache lingers, but the clarity retreats. Cadence decides to move forward. To forgive herself. To reshape her story. And in that gesture, something slips. The fire brought ruin, not rebirth. Some things do not need resolution. Only recognition.

Rating with a touch of flair: 4 out of 5 water taxi confessions

Standout character, both in terms of development and acting: Ed.