When Le Fanu originally pitched the book, he wanted to set it in his native Ireland. His publisher said that no one wanted to read Irish books, so Le Fanu moved the locale to Derbyshire. For this film, director Lisa Mulcahy and screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch have brought the story back to the Emerald Isle. Agnes O'Casey plays Maud Ruthyn, a recently orphaned heiress who is yet to come of age. The film begins with the executors of her father's will suggesting that she might want to contest being left in the care of her Uncle Silas, a man of bad reputation who is suspected of murder. Despite not knowing her uncle, Maud insists on following her father's wishes and points out that although her uncle was suspected of causing a man's death, the coroner reached a verdict of suicide.
Uncle Silas arrives in Maud's mansion with his rakish son, idiot daughter and a French governess, and takes Maud into his care. While initially amiable, it becomes apparent that he has designs on Maud's wealth and is not entirely interested in her welfare. The film becomes increasingly claustrophobic as Maud finds herself trapped in her home, unable to seek help outside it and forced to rely entirely on her own resources. This sense of the domestic environment as a trap is of course a recurring gothic trope.
I think the title change from the book is partly designed to draw the focus away from Silas to Maud. In conversation after the film, Mulcahy talked about how she and screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch to some extent wanted to subvert the novel and give Maud more agency. I found this somewhat curious; while I have not read the novel myself yet, my understanding is that Sheridan Le Fanu's Maud is more active and determined than some gothic heroines and that the book is a first person narrative that foregrounds Maud's thoughts, experiences, and actions, for all that it is named after her antagonist. Either way the film remains very focussed on Agnes O'Casey's Maud, who appears in pretty much every scene. David Wilmot's Silas nevertheless remains a formidable presence, affable, charming, and sinister, sometimes all at once. He is very much a villain in the Count Fosco mode.
One thing I was struck by was how unsympathetically Maud is presented, at least initially. This is despite the fact that we see everything from her point of view and never stop rooting for her to escape her peril. Yet at the start of her film we see her imperiously bossing around her servants and then curtly dismissing the concerns of her executors. She is also short with Silas's daughter Emily, someone who could otherwise have been recruited as an ally given the nastiness Silas displays towards her. I did find myself wondering if the servants' later lack of helpfulness is a reaction to their earlier treatment.
And I suppose another thing to mention is that while this is based on a gothic sensation novel, it is not even slightly camp. Once we gain a sense of the danger in which Maud finds herself we never lose sight that it is very real and potentially visceral. There is one particularly intense scene that in another film would have played very differently but here remains a horrible presentation of Maud's vulnerability. That scene in particular is not an easy watch and I could imagine it being particularly upsetting to some viewers. Lies We Tell is nevertheless a film I recommend highly, and I hope that we see more from both Agnes O'Casey and Lisa Mulcahy.
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Agnes O'Casey in Lies We Tell (Image: "Meet Agnes O’Casey, star of psychological thriller Lies We Tell")
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