The film stars Kacey Rohl as Katie Arneson, a university student who fakes a cancer diagnosis for the attention and financial gain, but gets caught up in having to maintain her lie.

A minor celebrity on campus, Katie uses her fraudulent disease for both emotional and financial gain, raising money through crowdfunding campaigns, while collecting friends, supporters and an unsuspecting girlfriend, Jennifer Ellis.

She hopes to sue her father to take the post down, but as the conversation progresses and Katie tacitly admits that she is faking the illness, she learns that if she is shown to be lying, she will face jail time for defrauding the public through her fundraising schemes.

With support from her community quickly fading, and determined to salvage her relationship with Jennifer, Katie overlooks an opportunity to come clean, and instead continues to betray and manipulate her devoted partner.

Yonah Lewis and Calvin Thomas began developing a film about a woman faking cancer for personal gain in 2012.

[3] Lewis and Thomas spent several years considering possible narrative structures for the film, including the "rise and fall" of standard biopics.

[9] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating to reviews, the film has a weighted average score of 81 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

[10] The Globe and Mail's Carly Lewis awarded the film four out of four stars and described it as "an incredible feat of showcasing the complicated scramble that is being alive."

"[13] The Hollywood Reporter's Stephen Dalton echoed the sentiment, stating, "Driven by nuanced, persuasive performances and shot with an urgent, jittery tension, White Lie is a compelling close-up character study of a recklessly needy anti-heroine caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making.