Film Review: Lies We Tell explores misogyny and power dynamics

Agnes O'Casey as Maud in Lies We Tell. Picture: Breakout Pictures

• Lies We Tell 
• ★★★★☆
• Cinema release

“What makes a monster?” asks the recently orphaned Maud (Agnes O’Casey) as the Victorian-era drama Lies We Tell (16s) begins. 

Soon to inherit the sprawling estate of Knowl in rural Ireland, Maud has yet to reach her age of majority, and fears the man appointed her guardian, her Uncle Silas (David Wilmot), who arrives at Knowl with his daughter Emily (Holly Sturton) and son Edward (Chris Walley) in tow, comes trailing sulphur, with a hard-earned reputation for licentiousness and perhaps even murder.

The austere Maud is outraged by Silas’s familiarity and his naked desire to usurp her claim on Knowl, but things quickly get worse when Silas orders the overbearing Edward to begin wooing Maud with a view to marriage.

Adapted by Elisabeth Gooch from Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, and directed by Lisa Mulcahy, Lies We Tell opens like a Jane Austen story as it explores the power dynamic between men and women (Maud is further plagued by lawyers and doctors who insist they know what’s best for her, and dismiss her fears as ‘hysteria’).

Gradually, however, the story grows more gothic in tone as Maud, confined to the rambling Big House, is subjected to a relentless campaign of physical and emotional abuse by her uncle. 

Effectively a psychological horror from the point where Maud realises there is no escape from her nightmare, the film is frequently shocking in the way it sidesteps the gentility we tend to associate with period drama to reveal how helpless Maud is when confronted by a rapacious patriarchy (“The law is made and enforced by men.”) 

Agnes O’Casey is excellent in the lead role, playing Maud as a woman who is vulnerable, brittle, and yet steely in her conviction not to yield, while David Wilmot is brilliantly sleazy as the villainous predator, even if the character of Silas is less rounded than he might have been.