There are certainly times when we watch a show and it reminds us of a previous show. But it’s rare when we watch a show and go, “This is basically the same plot as xxx.” That is certainly the feeling we got when we watched a new Spanish series on Hulu.
PAST LIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Waves crash on the shore in the middle of the night. “Majorca, 1998.” People party, then we hear a distant scream. A young woman lays lifeless on the pavement; her body is slowly dragged away.
The Gist: “Alicante, 2022.” Rita Montero (Elena Anaya) and her girlfriend Ángela (Nansi Nsue) arrive in the city so Rita can get her parents’ house ready to sell. Her mother recently died, but Rita, who lives in London and is a well-regarded film director, didn’t go to her funeral. Her relationship with her mother was not great, with her mom not fully getting past Rita coming out as gay.
Elsewhere in the city, during an annual festival, a group of longtime friends gather. Teresa (Belén Cuesta), Sole (Marta Etura), Carmen (Ana Rayo) and Lena (Lorena López) have all known each other since childhood, and they were close friends in high school. Another friend, Candela (Itziar Atienza) isn’t there because she can’t deal with them all in a group. One of them thinks they see Rita in the crowd, recognizing her even though they haven’t seen her in 25 years. Carmen’s husband Manolo (Jorge Usón) used to date Rita back in the day, when she was unsure of her sexual identity.
Being at her mom’s house is traumatic enough for Rita, and she refuses to get nostalgic when Ángela finds a class picture with everyone in it or other old items. Rita thinks back to her 18th birthday party, when she (Isa Montalbán) still had designs to go to law school, but her friends chipped in and got her a camcorder, knowing that she really wants to be a filmmaker. Another girl, Mati Rios (Laura Wedel) shows up with a gift, but the other girls do nothing but insult her, especially Candela (Marina Orta interpreta).
In the meantime, police detective Paula Rios (Irene Escolar) — Mati’s younger sister — gets an email notification that human remains have been found in Mallorca. She immediately goes from Alicante to the resort town; the remains have been found in an ocean cave whose water level had risen. The times she’s gone before, the remains that were found haven’t been Mati, but the possessions found with the remains, including a diary, are definitely her sister’s. When she comes back into town, she has to tell her mother, who still held out hope all these years that Mati had run off with an older French man, like people thought had happened when the Mati, Rita and their friends went on that trip to the island.
Rita reluctantly agrees to have dinner with Gloria and Manolo when she and Ángela walk into their real estate agency to put Rita’s mom’s house up for sale. Of course, the entire group ends up being there, even the snarky Candela, which sparks memories of when they were 18 and Candela kissed her; when Rita kissed her back, she was finally acknowledging that she was gay.
As they gather in the living room, Ángela surprises Rita with the videos she shot when she was 18. Rita, and everyone else, gets sad when Mati shows up on the screen — and that’s right when Paula walks in to tell everyone that Mati’s remains were found.
That evening, Rita has a panic attack, because that news about Mati triggers a pact she made with her friends on Mallorca 25 years ago, complete with a blood oath.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Past Lies (Original title: Las Largas Sombras) is essentially Yellowjackets but with prettier locations.
Our Take: Past Lies is so much like Yellowjackets that we almost want to lift our Season 1 review of that show, change character names and call it a day. But we won’t do that, because, well, you just don’t do that. But the plots are eerily similar, even if the pact that was created in Past Lies was during a sunny vacation on a Mediterranean island instead of while trying to survive in the Canadian forest.
Let’s dive into that difference a little bit more. Rita is the person that this story revolves around, and back in 1998 she was dealing with a lot of issues, not the least of which was her sexual identity. She’s also grappling with a lot of the same issues teens deal with, like the idea that you go your own way or pursue studies your parents want you to pursue. There is certainly something about what went on during that Mallorca trip that drove Rita to go to London and never come back. She may have intended to go to London and come back, but something about what happened to Mati and the pact amongst the friends kept her away.
It’ll be interesting to watch the story go back and forth in time, especially as it gets into how Mati ended up being alienated from a group that she was obviously close with prior to a few months before her death. As Teresa tells her husband Adrián (Fran Nortes), Mati “was a bit… complicated.” We want to see just how complicated she was.
As Paula looks into her sister’s death, it’ll also be interesting to see if Rita or the others in the group help or hinder her. What we’d like to see, though, is that same balance between past and present that we saw during the first season of Yellowjackets, which should give us a clue about the history of this group of friends.
Sex and Skin: Nothing besides kissing.
Parting Shot: Rita thinks about her and her friends standing on the beach 25 years prior, passing a knife around so they can make a cut on their hands for that blood oath.
Sleeper Star: This is a good place to mention the actors who play the rest of the younger version of the friend group: Teresa (Lucía Caraballo), Sole (Andrea López), Carmen (Ana de Alva) and Lena (Miriam Rubio).
Most Pilot-y Line: The scene where Paula walks in on the group, all conveniently gathered so she can tell them about Mati, was predictable and a little too easy. Then they pause the video so it freezes on a closeup of Mati’s face to make things even more obvious.
Our Call: STREAM IT. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with Past Lies, there’s nothing about it that tells us that the hasn’t already been done in the recent past.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
The post Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Past Lies’ On Hulu, Where A Group Of Women’s Lives Are Turned Upside Down By A Pact They Made In The ‘90s appeared first on Decider.
