Watching Lies We Tell (2023) feels like discovering treasure buried in your back garden, nothing grand, a few vintage pennies, but treasure all the same.
Based on the obscure 1864 novel Uncle Silas by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, the film opens with a voiceover. Watch anything based on a book and you’ll hear it. It’s the filmmakers way of getting the book’s voice into the film. Here the eighteen-year-old Maud (Agnes O’Casey) offers a short treatise on human nature, on becoming either a monster or an angel.
Following the death of her beloved father, Maud has inherited a vast fortune and Knowl, the family mansion somewhere in the green of Ireland. Still legally a minor, and of the fairer sex, a clutch of executors have control of the estate until she reaches the age of her majority, three years hence.
Against advice, determined to honour the terms of her father’s will, she welcomes to Knowl, as her guardian, her disgraced uncle Silas (David Wilmot). He brings with him a son, a daughter, her governess, and his many debts.
An air of civilised contempt quickly establishes between Maud and her uncle, as Silas tries to bring Maud and her money under his control. First he suggests a marriage to his son. When that doesn’t work he turns her servants against her and confines her. Knowl becomes a haunted house, its vast barracks of rooms a prison bathed in candlelight. When that fails he threatens to have her committed, for her nerves, and subjected to cold water therapy, waterboarding by another name.
There’s a real joy in watching Maud resist the ever more desperate attempts by Silas to have her submit to him. It’s in the way they talk to each other, sparring with nineteenth-century diction, hostility vailed by politeness. The thing of it is, no matter what he does to her, no mater how foul his actions, or the actions of those under his control, Maud will not be broken. She never allows Silas to remover her agency.
In many ways Maud feels like a very modern woman, but I have a sneaking suspicion that despite so much of the world changing, nothing much has changed. In a similar scenario played out in a contemporary setting, the same impulses would take over.
The writing is great, well paced, with each new horror turning into the next. Equally the direction is subtle, and brave enough to let the performances shine.
Darrin // Nightingale 