we have always lived in the castle review book

What does become clear is that her family punished her for her wild behavior-for roaming the grounds, burying objects, wielding her magic spells of protection around the sister she loves. She is also violent, describing her hatred for the villagers she encounters in her twice-weekly trips to the village she imagines them suffering and dead on the ground. Jackson’s Merricat shows herself to be angry, unruly, willful, and resistant to change. And the answer is never entirely clear, although what is clear is that Jackson never gives us anything like a motive that would, from a normative perspective, either explain Merricat or justify her family slaughter. Why Merricat poisoned her family is the strange terrain that Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle explores. She put arsenic in the sugar because she knew that her beloved sister Constance did not use sugar.

What we learn late in the novel, though, is that it was Merricat, twelve years old at the time, who poisoned her family. Constance was tried for the murder of her family and acquitted, although everyone in the town believes she is guilty. Six years ago, the rest of the Blackwood family-Constance and Merricat’s father, mother, brother, and aunt-mysteriously died of arsenic poisoning at a family dinner. The weird and enigmatic Merricat of Jackson’s novelĪt the heart of Jackson’s novel are the Blackwood sisters, Constance (Alexandra Daddario) and Merricat, who live alone with their disabled, mentally scattered Uncle Julian (Crispin Glover). Passon’s film is still a very good film in its own right, but it simply doesn’t challenge and baffle its viewers the way that Jackson’s novel does. Indeed, they shift the terrain of the narrative entirely from the enigmatic and even weird to the profoundly familiar. The seemingly small ways in which Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle diverges from Jackson’s novel, however, make a significant difference. And when we couldn’t, because things don’t always translate to the screen, we wanted to at least stay close to the essence of what the book is about. In an interview, Taissa Farmiga (who plays Merricat Blackwood) explains “Part of the desire of everybody attached-the director, the producers and actors-was to stick as close as possible to the novel. Indeed, it is perhaps the most faithful Jackson adaptation to date –certainly more faithful than the three principal versions of The Haunting of Hill House, for instance (Robert Wise’s 1963 film, Jan de Bont’s 1999 film, and Mike Flanagan’s 2018 serial Netflix adaptation).

In many ways, Stacie Passon’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (2018) is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel.

We have always lived in the castle review book