Post-screening discussion with Natalie O'Shea Executive Director of the Celtic Junction Arts Center and Beck Lee, Executive Director of the Cultural Fluency Initiative
Here’s a taut 19th century thriller, crackling with tension and barbed dialogue, that pits smart but stubborn young heiress Maud against her scheming guardian Uncle Silas (David Wilmot), his odious son, spoiled daughter and daughter’s sinister governess. In this clever feminist re-working of the Gothic novel by Sheridan Le Fanu, the orphan Maud (Agnes O’Casey, great-granddaughter of Irish literary giant Sean), still a minor, ignores the concerns of her late father’s trustees and agrees to be the ward of his estranged brother, only to find that the rumors about Silas’s shadowy and possibly murderous past are true and then some. Inspired screenwriter Elisabeth Gooch decided that she had had enough of passive Victorian heroines and wrote a film that she would want to see. Confidently directed by Lisa Mulcahy and lushly shot in available light by Eleonor Bowman, Lies We Tell is a breathtaking treat. –Alissa Simon
Content advisory: themes of sexual abuse