A devious apothecary sells poison to women who are desperate to dispatch their cruel husbands in Victorian England.
The film opens on a lesson in how to be a widow, delivered as calmly as a recipe. Three doses. The first makes him weak and irritable. The second brings on sickness that any doctor will read as an illness of the season. The third finishes it. Send for the most expensive physician money can buy. Be seen to weep, insist on a coroner's report, and wear black for as long as you can bear it, so that the world remembers you as the most devoted wife in the county.
In Victorian England, Julia runs an apothecary shop that sells deadly poison to women in need of escape from their domineering husbands. Mrs Theodora Finchley, unknowingly to Julia, will be her most significant client yet, possessing the potential to unravel her meticulously laid schemes.
Julia's trade depends on discretion. Her customers cannot ask openly for what they need, and she has made a careful habit of not enquiring too closely into what they intend to do with it.
The black lace of the title is the film's idea in one image. Mourning dress in the nineteenth century was heavily prescribed: crape, veils, a set number of months out of society. Julia turns that costume inside out. A woman shrouded and pitied is also a woman nobody looks at, and for the first time in her life nobody is entitled to her. The inverse of a bride in white, as she puts it.
What makes it more than a revenge fantasy is the law it keeps mentioning. A wife who left had no claim on her own property or her own children, and a husband who wanted her declared insane could generally find a doctor to agree. One client would have been committed by hers had the shop not intervened. Against that, poison looks less like the first resort of the wicked than the last resort of the trapped, and Julia is running a business on the difference.
Nine men have died in two months, the gentlemen at the club have begun to notice, and Julia has just decided to take one more appointment. Written by Anita Fry, Jasmine Fry and Nicole Sarah Fry, and directed and produced by Nicole Sarah Fry.