Castlerock

Castlerock is a very subtle, imagistic film at a very high level of refinement, which explains the presence of Borgnine and Gorshin, and even though it’s filmed against the background of the desert for an extreme of clarity, the cunning images have a way of deliberately shifting like sand dunes, making for a rarefied understanding.

The main derived images are from Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Sherin’s Valdez Is Coming and Richardson’s The Border, films that are imperfectly understood except by other filmmakers. Now, the way these images work is by reduction, that little suburban girl is the Statue of Liberty and all it represents, that suburban housewife has an undercurrent of mischief. Mind you, there’s nothing pretentious about Castlerock any more than Stevenson’s Old Yeller, only a solid, precise statement of fact, a cogent analysis of things not to be taken at face value.