Castle of Purity

Gabriel does not let his wife and three children out of the house. It has been so for eighteen years. The door is locked, the windows shut, and the children have never seen the world outside. Gabriel is the only one who goes out; he makes rat poison in the house and sells it in the street. When he comes back the order runs: there is a study timetable, working hours, punishment. His justification is moral; he counts the world outside as corrupted and wants to protect his family. But he lives another life out there himself. The children are growing and the house is no longer enough. Arturo Ripstein directs. Claudio Brook, Rita Macedo, Arturo Beristáin and Diana Bracho are in the cast. It is a Mexican production. The story rests on a real case; the trial of a man in Mexico who kept his family shut in a house for years was reported in the press. The writer José Emilio Pacheco worked with Ripstein on the screenplay. The matter it treats is domination set up under the name of protection; the film does not draw the man as a monster, which makes it more uncomfortable. The house itself is at the centre; the camera almost never goes outside and the space works by narrowing. Rain is constant in the film and moves along with the rotting of the house. Its limit is the watching; the narrative offers no hope and some scenes are hard to bear. Who it is for: viewers who like Mexican cinema and drama in closed spaces. Who it is not for: the subject is heavy, the register suffocating, and the ending hard.