TV REVIEW : ‘Liar, Liar’: A Telling and Suspenseful Molestation Story

In “Liar, Liar,” an 11-year-old girl accuses her picture-perfect father of sexual abuse. The vexing question throughout most of this tightly wound drama (at 9 tonight on CBS, Channels 2 and 8) is who is lying--the dad or the girl?

A Canadian production (which premiered in Canada on the CBC last January), the movie is perhaps the most candid and most suspenseful parent/child molestation story aired to date on U.S. television.

Although it’s not exploitative, some viewers may find it unnerving for young children. There are, for instance, some blurry black-and-white flashbacks of a girl’s head being pushed down on what appears to be a bathroom toilet but no jarring depictions of sexual abuse scenes. The horror here is innuendo, schoolyard gossip and mind games played by the rival parties.

The cleverly written script (by Nancy Isaak) is adept at lurching your sympathy first in one direction, then in another. Just when you think you are convinced who the liar is, the plot takes a nasty twist.

As the movie opens, a young, incorrigible girl, the scourge of an ostensibly happy family, terrorizes her little brother by locking him in the bathroom in one of several shrieking domestic scenes. The father (a squeaky-clean-looking Art Hindle) spanks her and the girl snuggles up to her younger sister in bed that night and tells her she has “a plan to get even with Daddy.”

The daughter, very well played by Vanessa King in a believably spiteful, hateful way, tells her school counselor that her father “does stuff” to her. That sounds a fire bell in the social welfare office, and the family’s life is quickly torn apart. The ensuing court battle (with Kate Nelligan playing the politically ambitious prosecutor) absorbs the final half of the program.