We Have Always Lived in the Castle

I suppose the interiority of Shirley Jackson’s prose proves a problem to visualize as several adaptations of her work jettison the slow creeping dread for other bells and whistles. Sure, Robert Wise got the balance right with The Haunting, but Jan De Bont absolutely did not. Do you remember the 1996 TV adaptation of The Lottery with Keri Russell? Did you even know The Bird’s Nest got adapted as a movie called Lizzie with Eleanor Parker?

What I’m trying to get at is that competent adaptations of Jackson’s work are few and far better between. Here’s Stacie Passon’s take on Jackson’s final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and it’s a bit too polite and quiet with a change to the ending that’s too obvious for Jackson’s more curlicue prose. All the incident and character motivations have been translated, and populated by a game and talented cast, but the spirit of the thing doesn’t feel right.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is narrated by someone that we would generously label as “unreliable” and throbs with a fragile intensity and vulnerability that threatens to explode at any moment. It’s a slow burn of tension where detail is slowly fed out piece by piece until the horrifying truth lands with an aggressive blow. That sense of perpetual unease and paranoia deflates here as the entire thing plays out like a melodrama about an odd family instead of gothic feminist yarn it really is.

Everything feels too composed and clean to really visualize the emotional abuse and displacement these characters go through. Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario are perfectly cast as the Blackwood sisters, and Sebastian Stan is appropriately seductive as the scheming cousin, but they appear to be enacting this in an immaculate dollhouse. Where’s the grime and rot that the house as slowly succumbed to? Much like the candy-coated kitchen and crinoline dresses of Daddario’s Catherine, this version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle has been remodeled to a too neat and too obvious melodrama that needed more slow-burning dread.