Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘A Couple of Lies‘ follows two couples whose vacations go horribly awry in the houses they swapped. Helene and Carl turn over the keys to their house in the Stockholm archipelago to Scarlett and Adam. In return, they get to live in the latter’s Sicilian villa. It seems like a perfect vacation, especially before they get swamped with the arrival of their first child. However, the calm and quiet that they came there for never finds Carl. The villa, with its creepy sounds at night and dead rats lying around, makes him queasy. Adding to the weird vibe are the posters of a missing tourist, Jake Reed; the investigation into his disappearance untangles many unexpected threads. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Jake Reed Turns Out to be a Red Herring
Jake Reed’s name comes up as Carl explores the villa and its surroundings. He finds a pamphlet about the Canadian tourist who has been missing for a few weeks, with no one the wiser about what happened to him. At this point, Carl is already beginning to question his memory. He has had blackouts for a while, and the stress of the job, along with the possibility of his life falling apart, is getting to him. His wife and even his phone tell him that he has been at the villa before, which happens to be around the same time the Reed went missing. The problem is that Carl has no memory of ever having come to this region, let alone of the villa before. He had been in Palermo around that time for a business deal. While Helene claims he took a short trip to Adam and Scarlett’s villa, Carl doesn’t remember it at all.
With all these doubts about his memory already plaguing him, the news of the 25-year-old missing man makes him wonder if he had any involvement in that. The cops certainly get that idea when they come around asking questions. The fact that Carl claims to know nothing about his trip comes off as odd to the officers, especially given that his wife is providing details that make him a primary suspect. Carl also starts to worry that the villa’s owners may have been involved in something bad. Perhaps they had something to do with Reed’s disappearance, and they swapped the place to wash their hands of the crime by having Carl and Helene framed for it. This doubt intensifies when Carl finds a dead body in a well swarming with rats, one of which ingested the dead man’s ring, which Carl later discovers on his walk.
The body’s condition is so bad that there is no face left to match with Reed’s picture. Afraid of how it will look, especially with an important business deal to be signed for his company, Carl decides not to go to the cops yet. During the meeting, he discovers that the body in the well cannot be Reed’s. Apparently, the tourist was lost, and while it had been a tense couple of weeks with his disappearance, he has finally been found. He is alive and well, which is great news for the region, since a tourist’s death could have affected tourism, on which the region’s economy is heavily dependent. While that’s good news for the tourist and his family, it raises another question: who is the man in the well? It eventually turns out that the victim is Scarlett’s brother, Tom.
He was killed by Helene and Adam, with Carl set up to be framed for it. The show keeps his identity a secret, portraying Reed as the potential victim to maintain uncertainty about which couple is the bad one in this case. At the beginning of the story, it is stated that neither couple has met the other. The lack of connection between them keeps the mystery of their true natures alive. Thus, Reed, a stranger, being suggested as a possible link to Scarlett and Adam’s wrongdoing keeps the couple in a questionable light. However, once the victim’s true identity is revealed, the truth starts to unravel at a much greater speed. The show uses Reed as the red herring to keep the viewers, as well as Carl, guessing about what’s really going on around him.
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