At first, though, Castle in the Ground<\/em> is an affecting look at the dreary life of Henry Fine (Alex Wolff), a recent high school graduate who\u2019s put off his college plans to care for his ailing mother Rebecca (Neve Campbell). It\u2019s clear that Rebecca\u2019s cancer isn\u2019t getting any better, but Henry insists on staking his entire future on her recovery, telling her that he\u2019ll go to school once she\u2019s on the mend. Wolff and Campbell have a natural mother-son dynamic, demonstrating the sweet but codependent relationship between the two, and Klein powerfully cross-cuts to illustrate the toll that the caretaker role takes on Henry, right up until the end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After Rebecca passes away, Henry spirals quickly downward, breaking up with his good-natured college-bound girlfriend in a single brief phone call, and retrieving Rebecca\u2019s unused cache of pain medication. His descent into full-blown drug dependence is abrupt and jarring; he goes from zero to addict before the end of Rebecca\u2019s shiva. That\u2019s also the last time the movie engages with Henry\u2019s Jewish identity, which seems like a central facet of his life in the first act, when he wraps tefillin around his arms and recites daily prayers. It\u2019s not that Henry abandons his religious devotion after his mother\u2019s death, but more that Klein just ignores it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Both Henry and the movie shift their attention to Henry\u2019s new neighbor Ana (Imogen Poots), a recovering heroin addict staying in her aunt\u2019s empty apartment while she\u2019s enrolled in a methadone program. Ana isn\u2019t particularly responsible with her recovery, though, and she soon draws Henry into her world of pills and parties, relying on him for rides and money, and putting him in harm\u2019s way when a local dealer targets Ana over a bag of pills stolen by one of her friends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This vaguely defined crime subplot takes over the film\u2019s second half, making it more difficult for Klein to build a convincing connection between Henry and Ana, who are somewhere between romantic and familial in their affection. Klein uses dim, gauzy cinematography to give a sense of the drug-induced haze that the characters live in, but he doesn\u2019t bring anything new to the way that addiction is depicted onscreen, and the character arcs are truncated once Henry and Ana start spending all their time together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As he proved in Hereditary<\/em>, Wolff is an expert crier, and he gives a sensitive performance as Henry, even after the movie loses interest in how he\u2019s processing his feelings. Ana is never more than a collection of quirks and demands, but Poots imbues her with as much tragic desperation as possible with the material she\u2019s given. Ana\u2019s friends are interchangeable hoodlums and hangers-on, and the movie\u2019s depiction of the drug scene in a small Ontario town is limited and insular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Klein shoots the movie in the old-school TV-style 4:3 aspect ratio, which may be an attempt to depict the constrained worldview of the addict, but mostly reinforces the feel of a well-intentioned but dramatically inert story destined for classrooms and public television. “Castle in the Ground” is available Friday on demand.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" An artsier version of what might have been a network TV movie in the 1980s, writer-director Joey Klein\u2019s addiction drama […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":539,"featured_media":14054,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340,1381],"tags":[1098,162],"class_list":["post-14051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-movies","tag-movie-review","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/539"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22835,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14051\/revisions\/22835"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/castle2-1024x576.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nC+<\/h1>\n\n\n\n