With the reappearance of Madame de la Rougierre, Maud is torn between trust in Uncle Silas and mounting suspicion about a plot on her life. Alone and virtually a prisoner in the grim house, Maud realises too late that she is caught in a lethal trap.

After the death of her father, Maud goes to live with her guardian Uncle Silas but she refuses to believe the horrifying allegations about his involvement in a brutal murder. With the reappearance of two sinister figures from the past, fear and doubts begin.

Maud, the young heiress to a fortune, is romantically obsessed by the youthful Byronic painting of her uncle Silas. The arrival of a drunken, drug-addicted governess and an encounter with a brutish young man in a churchyard are the beginnings of a web of deception and terror.