Warning: this post is filled with spoilers from beginning to end.
False Witness, published in 2021, is a revenge story that begins in 1998 when fourteen-year-old Callie is babysitting ten-year-old Trevor. Callie is also having sex with Trevor’s dad, Buddy. When Callie discovers that Buddy has been recording them having sex and sharing the videos with other men in the community, she threatens to tell Buddy’s wife. Buddy’s beating of Callie commences immediately. Callie gets away, grabs a kitchen knife, and manages to slash Buddy’s leg, severing the femoral vein. Buddy begs Callie to get him help before he bleeds to death. Instead, Callie calls her eighteen-year-old sister Harleigh. When Harleigh arrives and learns everything that has gone on between Callie and Buddy, she wraps plastic wrap around Buddy’s head until he suffocates. Then Harleigh and Callie cut him into pieces and bury him in a lot that will soon be covered in concrete.
Twenty-three years later, Harleigh, who now goes by Leigh, is a lawyer, and Callie is an opioid junkie. Leigh’s act of revenge all those years ago comes back to haunt her when Trevor, who has changed his name to Andrew, blackmails her into defending him against a rape charge. Turns out that Andrew is just as fucked up as his pedophile dad, Buddy. Turns out that Andrew is also the only person on Earth who cared that Buddy disappeared all those years ago.
Leigh tracks down Callie and tells her what’s going on, hoping Callie will leave town before Andrew can start fucking with her, too. Of course, Callie refuses. Of course, Andrew starts fucking with Callie. When Andrew threatens Leigh’s daughter, though, Callie snaps. In the end, Callie gets her revenge against Andrew, but she sacrifices her own life in the process.
Let me be real here. False Witness is not going to be a Netflix limited series the way Pieces of Her was. Callie is a low-class junkie. Callie and Leigh’s mom is a violent bitch. Buddy is a pedophile who groomed Callie by raping her until she convinced herself that she liked it. I don’t think Netflix has the balls to give False Witness the limited series treatment.
It's too bad, though, because False Witness is filled with great characters. Andrew seems like a cute dork at first. Poor guy is being falsely accused of rape, or so he claims. Gradually, though, he reveals just how deranged and scary he is. His fiancé Sydney is a psychopath who kills a woman as a wedding gift to him. When Callie asks Andrew if he turned Sydney into a nut, he tells her that Sydney was special before he met her. His pride in her lunacy is palpable. Callie and Leigh’s mom is an enforcer for the area slumlords, hates people, and loves animals. Before killing a man with plastic wrap, Leigh went to juvie twice as a kid. The other middle-class soccer moms would be appalled. And then there’s Callie, the junkie who is witty and funny and inherited a love of animals from her mom. Although she can’t break her addiction and lives mostly on the streets, she works as an assistant for a veterinarian, who is somewhat of a father figure for her.
Callie got under my skin. I should have been disturbed that she killed Andrew and his fiancé. But I wasn’t. What I was instead was sad that Callie killed herself ridding the world of them. Life for Callie was filled with so much pain, though, that death was the only way she was ever going to find peace.
Comments
Post a Comment