A Tell-Tale Heart is a tense and gory re-imagining of the classic Edgar Allan Poe tale that flips the script and depicts a young woman's spiral into madness at the hands of the predatory men all around her.

SYNOPSIS:

After applying to a posting looking for a live-in maid, the seemingly polite but reserved Mary Allan is hired on at the House of Usher to care for the home’s proprietor, Roderick Usher, whose sight has begun to fail him in his elderly years. While at first the position seems tedious, Mary soon discovers that she was brought on to fill the role Madeline Usher – Roderick’s sister – played before her untimely suicide. In light of this revelation, Mary begins to grow suspicious of the men all around her, for Roderick’s mind slowly gives way to dementia, causing him to make suggestive advances toward her, the ever threatening groundskeeper, Jupe, watches her every move and a prying investigator, Auguste Dupin, questions her about Madeline’s death, seeking to make sense of the curious incident. As their collective “male gaze” closes in on Mary and grows more lustful and menacing, visions of a black cat from her past appear, mocking her sanity and driving her toward once forgotten alcoholic tendencies. Eventually, Mary cracks under the dower weight of the House of Usher and begins plotting the demise of its inhabitants, most notably the “vulture eyed” Roderick Usher. She then proceeds to carry out a lengthy, calculated and cautious scheme that results in Jupe’s demise and Roderick’s gruesome murder in the dead of night. Yet, moments after the affair Dupin arrives, having deduced that Mary murdered her own father years before to exact revenge for forcing himself on her sexually. In the midst of his questioning though, Mary turns on the investigator, cutting his eyes from his skull and snuffing out the “male gaze” for good. With that, she’s left alone in the House, void of the men who drove her mad, but still mad nonetheless.