When eighteen-year-old Maud’s father dies, she inherits Knowl, a sprawling country estate that should secure her future, except there’s a catch: she won’t truly control it until she turns twenty-one. Until then, someone must serve as her guardian, and her father’s will names the most unlikely candidate imaginable—Uncle Silas, a man whose very name carries the weight of scandal. The rumors that trail him are dark and persistent: gambling debts that ruined him, a dissolute lifestyle that isolated him from respectable society, and whispers of something far worse, something that might involve murder. He’s lived as a pariah for years, and now he’s coming to Knowl, bringing his family with him.

They arrive like a storm cloud: Silas himself, his aimless son Edward, his distracted daughter Emily, and a severe governess who goes only by Madame. What should feel like a house coming alive with new energy instead becomes suffocating, the atmosphere growing heavier with each passing day. Silas presents himself as a kindly uncle at first, all gentle manners and concerned expressions, but the mask doesn’t hold for long. His true agenda crystallizes with chilling clarity—he believes Knowl should be his, that he’s entitled to what his brother left behind, and he has a plan to claim it. The preferred method is simple enough: marry Maud off to Edward, binding the inheritance to the family through matrimony. But there are contingencies, darker options lurking behind his eyes, methods that don’t require anyone’s consent.

As the threats escalate and violence enters the equation, something awakens in Maud. She’s not the passive heroine of a typical gothic tale, waiting to be rescued or resigned to being destroyed. The danger ignites something fierce in her, a determination to fight for what’s rightfully hers, to refuse the fate these men have mapped out for her. Family secrets begin to surface, ugly truths that have been buried for years, and with each revelation, Maud’s resolve hardens. By the time she understands the full scope of their intentions, her fury isn’t just justified—it’s righteous, and it’s unstoppable.

LIES WE TELL takes Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic novel UNCLE SILAS and transforms it into something urgent and vital for our moment. The original gothic framework is still there—the isolated estate, the vulnerable young woman, the menacing male relatives—but the film refuses to let its heroine remain a victim. Instead, it hands her the tools to fight back, to claim not just her inheritance but her agency, her voice, her very right to determine her own future. This is Gothic literature seen through a feminist lens that refuses compromise, a story where the woman in peril becomes the woman who refuses to perish, who takes her fortune and her fate into her own hands and dares anyone to try and stop her.