‘Castle in the Ground’ riveting addiction drama
Both mundane and nightmarish, writer-director Joey Klein’s beautifully acted opioid addiction drama “Castle in the Ground” is a genuine find in this time of mainstream films being withheld from the marketplace and indies jockeying for audiences online. I strongly advise you to seek out this CanadianAmerican gem.
Nineteen-year-old Henry (Alex Wolff in a variation of his role in Ari Aster’s “Hereditary”) is a young orthodox Jew who lives in Sudbury, Ontario, with his beautiful, dying, needy mother Rebecca in a big, dark apartment. Each morning he brings her a tray with a crushed painkiller, a cup of coffee and other things to make her life less miserable. She addresses her son as “my love,” with a distinctive catch in her throat. The father-husband is out of the picture.
Across the hall a new neighbor has moved in. She is loud and people bang on her door at all hours. She is Ana (Imogen Poots), and she is an opioid addict with a small list of male friends, and a relative who pays for the apartment.
After Rebecca relapses and dies of an overdose of fentanyl and painkillers, Henry shuns his rabbi and relatives and gets high on his late mother’s leftover supply and begins to share it with Ana. He doesn’t do it in exchange for sex. He likes the slightly older Ana’s company. In a very strange way, she becomes his surrogate Rebecca, the mother he cares for beyond the grave. Although she says, “I am not your mother,” explicitly in one scene, Ana’s needs oddly mirror Rebecca’s. Henry almost welcomes having the albatross hung once again around his neck.
I assume the title “Castle in the Ground” refers to a coffin or mausoleum. Certainly, everyone in the film has one foot in the grave, and it gives the proceedings a whiff of the weird, damaged relationships and premature burials in the work of Edgar Allen Poe.
In fact,“Castle in the Ground” has a whole opioid “House of Usher” vibe. This includes newly deceased Rebecca, doppelganger Ana, drug zombie Henry and Ana’s crew of friends, who inhabit a shadowy underworld where the body count
is high in overdoses, and gunfire frequently erupts. The Grim Reaper is a white panel van on your trail or a big guy in a creepy baby mask.
Ana asks Henry to drive her to an abandoned apartment building, where squatters throw drug-fueled raves and addicts steal from one another and argue. It’s the opioid addict’s crazy crack house. Keir Gilchrist is a standout as a stungun-wielding dealer nicknamed Polo Boy. Ditto for Welshman Tom Cullen as a gun-waving, gay addict whose lover has just OD’d.
Henry’s long silences and natural courage bestow an aura of youthful majesty, as if he is some modern incarnation of Prince Hal, steeling himself with these small brushes with death. Poots, who has the addict’s reflexive mendacity down pat, has never been better.
I have not seen Klein’s debut feature “The Other Half ” with Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) and Cullen. But I will now.
(“Castle in the Ground” contains profanity, drug use and sexually suggestive language.)