Mark Reviews Movies: CASTLE IN THE GROUND

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 14, 2020

Grief is a process, and under certain circumstances (and, well, within the big picture of life), so is dying. Castle in the Ground, in which a grieving young man becomes involved in the world of prescription drug abuse and dealing, slams both of those processes together. The guy wants to evade the pain of mourning, and in doing so, he becomes attached to a group of people whose own evasion of pain is leading them down a path of drawn-out but inevitable death.

The whole of the film, written and directed by Joey Klein, becomes like two overlapping circles of misery, propelled by the cyclical natures of addiction and depression and guilt. Klein frames this study of people inching ever closer to the edge of ruin within a plot about a drug deal gone wrong, but the mechanics of that plot are secondary concerns. The particulars of the story are much less important than the particulars of how and why these characters are willing to risk death for a temporary escape. By the end of it, they might even want the permanent escape of an overdose or a vindictive dealer.

It all begins with Henry (Alex Wolff), a good kid who has put college on hold to care for his mother Rebecca (Neve Campbell). She has recovered from a cancer diagnosis after a lot of difficult treatment, and now, Henry is mashing prescription opioids and mixing the powder with jam to ease his mother's regular bouts of debilitating pain.

From the start, we get a sense of Klein's method to presenting this story. It unfolds in a dreamlike daze—scenes of the mother and son talking about his future, montages of preparing the medication, flashes of Rebecca suffering. The film's editing (provided by Jorge Weisz) becomes even more elliptical as Henry's mental state declines, and the dreaminess of those scenes of tenderness and compassion transform into nightmarish moments of bad choices made out of desperation.

Before all of that, though, Rebecca learns that the cancer has returned, but she doesn't tell her son immediately. Her talks about Henry's future become more concrete—"when" she gone, not "if," he has to promise to go to college. Rebecca has resigned herself to death without any treatment, but Henry wants her to keep fighting.

In a particularly haunting sequence, the mother comes out of her room—asking, then begging, and then angrily demanding that Henry give her a prescription pain-relief patch. He was told mixing the patch and the pill could be dangerous, but he does so, anyway, because it's what his mother wants. Henry lies in bed with his mother as she drifts to sleep, and then he's standing next to her coffin. There's a funeral, a return home to stare at some of the pills that remain in the cabinet, a flashback to him comforting Rebecca, and then more staring at the medication, now smashed and mixed with jam, like he prepared for his mother, on a spoon in his hand. Within the silence of grief and loneliness and longing, we watch and hear the metal of the spoon hitting his teeth.

Klein makes these connections—between the reason for wanting to escape and the promise of the escape itself—with the simple potency of montage. That sequence is as effective as it is, not only because it presents information about what has happened in a such a jarring way, but also because it illuminates the idea of grief and relief as conjoined cycles. Once Henry unintentionally gets involved in the underground business side of opioid dealing, both of those circles start spiraling toward doom.

The impetus for that is Henry's new neighbor, a charming but potentially self-destructive woman named Ana (Imogen Poots). She has become involved in a bad drug deal with some friends.

The two meet, while Rebecca is still alive, at the pharmacy, where Henry is getting his mother's prescriptions and Ana is trying to get methadone to curb her addiction to a prescription she once had. Ana is adept at manipulation, seeing even the smallest of "favors" on her part (not playing the music too loud while Henry's dying mother is trying to sleep) as a reason for a greater favor in return. Alone and in pain, Henry connects with his neighbor, thinking, perhaps, that he can help her. He does, after all, give his mother's old cellphone to Ana and, later, is taken aback when he wakes up to see her in one of Rebecca's dresses.

The plot, which involves a stolen bag of fake drugs and a dealer with a reputation for doing terrible things in the back of windowless van, plays out in the background, which is the right choice for two reasons. First, it ensures that film's attention is squarely on these characters. As they mostly stumble through mistakes and bad decisions about how to handle their big error, Klein simply observes how each additional complication, every reminder of some past or newly gained pain, and all of this gloom just renew the need for the escape of those pills. As one of Ana's friends puts it, when they learn that the fake drugs might be deadly, part of the thrill is that every hit might be the final one.

Second, it cements Henry's role in this world. He's part of it, yes, but he's more like a tourist, capable of leaving but drawn to it for reasons that Klein has made clear through smart and effective filmmaking (A late shootout, for example, takes place in the background, while Henry watches from a safe distance). Castle in the Ground gives us the sense that such is how all of these people started—as visitors, now on an indefinite vacation leading toward that permanent one.

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