Saskia Noort’s bestseller De Eetclub reaches Netflix as a seven-part Dutch series about four wealthy couples in Bergen, a rota of lavish dinners and a house fire that leaves every guest with something to hide.

Saskia Noort gave her novel a plain title. De Eetclub means “the dinner club”, and it names an institution rather than a crime: four couples in a comfortable Dutch village, a rota of evenings in each other’s houses, and a fire that kills one of the husbands. When Netflix adapted the book, the English title moved the stress from the table to what gets said across it. The Perfect Lie is a promise about secrecy, where the original was a description of a social habit. That small shift, from the place to the lie, is a useful way into a Dutch series whose premise belongs to one of the oldest shapes in crime fiction: a closed circle of people who each know a little more than they are prepared to say.

What The Perfect Lie is about

The story follows Karen, played by Loes Haverkort, who moves with her husband and their daughter to Bergen, a prosperous village in the province of North Holland. There she runs into Hanneke, a friend from an earlier chapter of her life, and through her she is invited into the dinner club: a group of well-off couples who take turns hosting, who drink good wine in large houses and who treat a generous table as a way of life. For a newcomer, the invitation is a shortcut into a village that would otherwise take years to open its doors.

Then one of the villas burns down, and Evert, played by Edwin Jonker, dies in the fire. Evert’s wife, Babette, is left at the centre of the group’s grief, and Karen begins to suspect that the fire was not the accident it is taken to be. The premise Netflix has put forward is that every member of the circle is hiding something. The question that drives the seven episodes is therefore wider than who started the fire. It is who, among the people around that table, had a reason to make sure nobody looked too closely afterwards.

That makes Karen a particular kind of protagonist. She is not a detective and she has no authority to ask questions. She is a guest, and the access she has to the other couples is exactly as deep as their hospitality allows. Every dinner she attends is also a visit to someone’s home, on terms that someone else has set. The audience enters the group with her, learning its rules as she does, which is the classic position of the outsider in a story about an inner circle.

From Saskia Noort’s novel to a seven-episode series

Saskia Noort is one of the best-selling crime writers in the Netherlands, an author who built her readership with suspense novels set among people who appear to have everything in order. Her debut, Terug naar de kust, established the pattern, and De Eetclub turned it into a bestseller: the comfortable life as the setting, the crime as the thing that exposes what that comfort rests on. The book had already been adapted once for Dutch cinemas before Netflix took it on, which says something about how firmly the story has settled into Dutch popular culture.

The adaptation was written by Dorien Goertzen as head writer, with Jop Esmeijer. Their task is the familiar one of turning a novel into a series, with a specific complication. The novel is told from Karen’s point of view, so the reader knows what she knows and suspects what she suspects. A series with eight principal actors cannot rely on a single consciousness in the same way. Any screen version has to decide how much of the other couples’ lives to show outside Karen’s sight, and when, because every scene that she does not witness changes the balance between what the audience knows and what she knows.

Seven episodes is also a different form from the cinema version that came before. A feature film has to compress a novel’s chain of dinners into a handful of scenes; a limited series has room to give each evening, and each household, its own weight. That space is what streaming adaptations of crime novels usually sell themselves on, and it is the clearest reason to return to a book that Dutch audiences already know.

Two directors and a Dutch production team

The seven episodes are directed by Dana Nechushtan and Margien Rogaar, who share the series between them. Splitting a limited series across two directors is common practice in European television, where episodes are often shot in blocks, and it places a particular responsibility on the scripts to keep the information flowing in the right order from one director’s episodes to the other’s. In a mystery built on what each character withholds, the order in which things are revealed is most of the craft.

The series is produced by Fiction Valley, an independent Dutch production company, with Jacqueline de Goeij and Annemieke van Vliet as producers. It joins a line of Dutch-language Netflix originals that the platform has offered to an international audience, a catalogue that includes the dark drama Ares and the Amsterdam-set Dirty Lines. The bet in each case is the same one Netflix has made across Europe: a local story, told in its own language, can travel if the premise is strong enough to work without translation.

Bergen, the setting that does the work

Bergen is not a neutral backdrop. The village sits near the dunes and the North Sea coast of North Holland, a short drive from Alkmaar, and it has long had a reputation as one of the more affluent places in the country, a village of large detached houses and well-kept gardens. Its name carries associations for Dutch readers in the way that certain towns in Surrey or Connecticut do for British or American ones.

That matters because of the Dutch relationship with money. The Netherlands likes to see itself as a sober country where showing off is in poor taste, a self-image captured in the familiar saying “doe maar normaal, dan doe je al gek genoeg” (just act normal, that is crazy enough). In that culture, an exclusive dinner club in a wealthy village is a quiet display of status, a way of marking who is inside without ever announcing it. Noort’s novel draws its tension from that contradiction, and the series inherits it: a group that presents itself as a circle of friends is also a private arrangement among people with a lot to lose.

A genre that grew up around the premise

Viewers outside the Netherlands will recognise the outline from English-language television. Big Little Lies, adapted from Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel, put a group of wealthy parents in Monterey around a death they agree to keep quiet about. The Undoing, based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s novel You Should Have Known, set a murder inside a privileged New York marriage. Nine Perfect Strangers locked a group of affluent adults inside a wellness retreat. All three share the premise that money buys a certain kind of discretion, and all three reached the screen long after Noort’s book first appeared.

None of those series is derived from De Eetclub, but the comparison is useful in two directions. It explains why Netflix saw international potential in a Dutch novel from the previous decade: the market for affluent-circle mysteries is now proven. And it highlights what the Dutch story has that the American ones do not. In Monterey, wealth is spectacle, with ocean views and visible luxury. In Bergen, wealth is supposed to stay discreet, and a crime in that setting threatens two things at once: the people involved and the polite fiction that nobody there is really that rich.

The structure itself is older than any of these series. A closed setting, a fixed group of characters and an outsider who arrives at the start of the story is the shape of the drawing-room drama. Henrik Ibsen built plays on it, and Agatha Christie built a body of work on the dinner party where everyone has a motive. The dinner club gives that old form a contemporary engine. Because the evenings rotate from house to house, each dinner moves the drama into a different home, with a different host controlling what the guests see.

The cast of The Perfect Lie

Loes Haverkort leads the series as Karen, the newcomer at the centre of the story and the character through whom the audience meets the club. Around her, the ensemble includes Remko Vrijdag as Ivo Smit, Rifka Lodeizen, Noortje Herlaar, Edwin Jonker as Evert, Charlie-Chan Dagelet, Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen and Teun Luijkx. For a Dutch audience these are familiar names from film, theatre and television; for most viewers abroad, the series is an introduction to them.

The Perfect Lie - Netflix — The Perfect Lie. Photo: Netflix

The casting reflects the demands of the format. A story about four couples needs eight actors who can each carry part of the mystery, since every member of the circle is a potential keeper of the secret. An ensemble of established performers rather than a single star with supporting players is the logical choice for a premise in which suspicion has to be spread evenly around the table.

One story, many titles

The series travels under a remarkable range of names, and each one reads the story differently. In Germany it is Und hüte dich vor dem Bösen, a warning about evil. In France it is Petits meurtres entre voisins, small murders among neighbours. Italy calls it Il gusto amaro del tradimento and Portugal O Gosto Amargo da Traição, both about the bitter taste of betrayal. Spanish-language audiences know it as El club gastronómico, Brazil as As Amigas do Clube, Turkey as Yalanlar Kulübü, the club of lies. Poland and Romania keep the English idea, as Kłamstwo idealne and Minciuna perfectă, while the Scandinavian titles, Middagssällskapet, Madklubben and Middagsklubben, stay closest to Noort’s original by naming the dinner club itself.

For a story about how people describe themselves to each other, the list is oddly fitting. Some titles emphasise the crime, some the betrayal, some the social ritual, and only a few stay with the plain institution that Noort chose. Each is a small act of interpretation, and taken together they map the range of readings the premise allows: thriller, moral drama, social satire.

Release details

The Perfect Lie premiered globally on Netflix on September 10, 2026. It is a seven-episode limited series in Dutch, adapted by Dorien Goertzen and Jop Esmeijer from Saskia Noort’s novel De Eetclub, directed by Dana Nechushtan and Margien Rogaar and produced by Fiction Valley. The cast is led by Loes Haverkort, with Remko Vrijdag, Rifka Lodeizen, Noortje Herlaar, Edwin Jonker, Charlie-Chan Dagelet, Matthijs van de Sande Bakhuyzen and Teun Luijkx.

The English title promises a single perfect lie, something to be found and exposed. The premise points elsewhere: a group of people who each have something to protect, and who understand that the truth would cost all of them at once. Whether the series ends up closer to its English title or to Noort’s plainer original is a question for its final episode. What the setup already makes clear is that in Bergen, a seat at the dinner table comes with conditions.