Alias Miss Dodd

In the hushed sanctum of a sun-bleached bindery, Jeanne—ink under her fingernails, rebellion in her marrow—receives a cracked-leather diary whose acid-brown pages hiss with invented sins: bigamist Thomas Dodd paints himself a libertine, his kin a cabal of poisoners and blackmailers. Instead of recoiling, Jeanne stitches the scandal into her own skin, forges a birthright, and glides into the Dodds’ candle-scented mansion as the prodigal daughter no one invited. The joke is cosmic: the ogre of the diary is a tremulous pensioner who merely dreamt his own villainy; the lone viper, Uncle Jerry, was once the solitary soul Thomas sentimentalised. While Jeanne tries to stage-manage other people’s hearts—pushing Kent, the wry war-returned nephew, toward wronged Hazel—her own pulse betrays her, drumming for Kent’s dry wit and paint-stained cuffs. Enter Sarah Ross, the diary’s supposed ruined heroine, now a straight-backed botanist who swears she never bore a child; her single sentence topples Jeanne’s scaffolding of lies. By the time Jerry’s forged deed meets Jeanne’s flick-knife guile, truth ricochets like light in a broken mirror: diaries burn, masks drop, and two proposals—one from Kent on a moon-soaked terrace, one from Thomas to Sarah amid the smell of freshly milled paper—close the film on a breath that is half-laugh, half-sigh.