It means well, but....

The best thing about the film is the soft, sensuous photography. But great cinematography alone does not a great movie make.

Four women who barely know one another get together for a weekend in an idyllic upstate New York setting, and writer/director M. Brash then proceeds to try his best Bergman impression. Predictably, he doesn't come close.

'Lying' has an interesting premise (the deliberate pursuit of human manipulation), but it rambles aimlessly over the screen, unfocused, uneven and often stupefyingly dull. There are LONG moments in this film where nothing happens: we stare at Chloe Sevigny (the lead actor) sitting on a hill and try to pretend we know what she's thinking.

What really killed this film for me was the sound, or, worse, the lack of it. (This was a DVD; I didn't see the movie at a theatre, where, perhaps, the sound was better.) In any case, on the DVD there are whole segments of dialogue that are muted or blunted, and we literally don't hear the actors, who, too frequently, slur their words. In a movie where what people SAY is crucial, this in inexcusable.

This brings me to one of my favorite subjects: IMDb ratings. This well-meaning dud boasts a ranking of about 6.8 on IMDb, very high indeed, and very suspicious indeed. Once again, I conclude that everyone who ever knew the director -- crew, actors, family, near-family, etc., etc., joined forces to give 'Living' a rating it doesn't deserve. The film had only a limited release (for good reason), and has been panned just about everywhere, except, of course, by IMDb 'voters'. I think the object lesson here is that we should take IMDb's rating system with a huge grain of salt.