Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Taissa Farmiga, Alexandra Daddario, Sebastian Stan, Crispin Glover, Paula Malcomson, Peter Coonan, Ian Toner, Joanne Crawford, Anna Nugent, Peter O’Meara, Luan James-Geary, Cormac Melia, Liz O’ Sullivan, Bosco Hogan, Stephen Hogan, Maria Doyle Kennedy.

A film that comes with no fanfare and preconceptions is almost always one that will have you fixated throughout, not because of its reliance on studio CGI or on the box office name that lights up the screen, but because of its simple and yet highly effective story-telling, the interest in the range of characters, and a small truth that must always be held in such circumstances, that life, for all its possibilities, is the ordinary given room to tell its tale.

In We Have Always Lived In The Castle, it is the ordinary that stands out, the interaction based on a dark secret and the threat of an intervention that gives the film its edge, the disquiet of empathising with the young woman who bares the brunt of the townsfolk’s hatred, the sincerity of holding firm with the devastation placed upon the remaining family members as they hide away in their own virtues and fears; the ordinary holds its own distinctive pattern of fortune and one in which Mark Kruger, as the screen writer, delves deeply into.

Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario captures the heart as the two sisters, Merricat and Alexandra, each one almost jostling with forced dedication to making the most of their lives and with a well-rounded support from Sebastian Stan as their conniving cousin Charles and the ever insightful and appreciative Crispin Glover as their uncle, what comes across is the state of disquieting anarchy in which the household rests upon. Not until the two women’s lives are disturbed by the idea of loss once more does the anarchy and the supposed spell laid down to protect them, begin to unravel.

In the exposing of a town’s hatred, of the way that society finds ways to continue punishing long after a crime of passion or self-defence has been paid for, we are opening our own minds to that of justice being, at times, a perverse and senseless emotion which is carried out by the frenzied and the attack minded when finally they get their chance to exact retribution.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle is an open piece of work that had virtually no fanfare on release and yet holds its ideals out firmly, undisguised, uninhibited, alone but crowded, a story in which the fall out of a secret is often best left unspoken.

Ian D. Hall