we have always lived in this castle book

It only takes a little spark to set the public off, their faces lit up by the (sometimes literal) flames of a regular order restoring itself. And by showing us the masses who despise her right back, the film gets its chance to leave Merricat's head and explore prescient ideas of anti-elitism and mob mentality.

Farmiga lets her whole body tense up when she has to leave the house it's clear this girl has inherited her parents' disdain for common folk. Of more interest is the broader picture of the town as seen through Merricat's eyes. The film misses its chance to really milk the simmering anger for all it's worth. It's a big part of the reason why the middle stretches of Castle feel so repetitive and dramatically inert, as we simply watch Merricat staking out Charles from a distance. If you just take her at face value, she can't be much more than a scared, stunted girl throwing temper tantrums, and that's essentially what she becomes in the film. Merricat's unreliable nature, the way her own sense of passivity sits at odds with her actual role in the Blackwood power dynamic, is another tough thing to pull off onscreen. But she's pretty worked up even before he arrives, wilting from the effort of running errands in the village.

Merricat naturally hates Charles, as he represents a threat to her carefully conceived order of the house. But Sebastian Stan, as the dashing cousin Charles who shows up at the house to woo Constance and make a stab at the family fortune, is never quite able to pull off the duplicitous charm of this strange new interloper. Two men are also in the picture: Crispin Glover is always halfway to disturbed, so he makes a fine Uncle Julian, the girls' dithering relative who was paralyzed by the poison attack and now spends his days obsessively recreating that deadly dinner in his memoirs. Taissa Farmiga plays Merricat with her anxieties front and center, blindly battling a world she doesn't understand, while Alexandra Daddario makes Constance into a beautiful, naive waif whose cluelessness practically renders her a ghost. It's a shame, then, that director Stacie Passon (who previously helmed the erotic drama Concussion) makes the creepy stuff too low-key, less a case of building dread than growing impatience. But any adaptation that can't sell this central hook will put the story's other elements - Constance's sexual repression and the public's simmering hatred of the Blackwoods chief among them - out of whack. This mystery is tough to render on film, because it's so dependent on the inner mindsets of the characters.

We have always lived in this castle book