Worth: $7.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Arish Sirkissoon, Rio Notra Segal, DR Raj Singh, Sibongiseni Shezi, Edwin Cole
Intro:
... feels like a penultimate draft of a film.
Marking the sophomore effort of writer/director Arish Sirkissoon (Tokoloshe), The Castle is a South African horror which sees a couple’s honeymoon go spectacularly wrong. And not in a hotel-lost-their-booking kind of way.
Michael (Sirkissoon again) and Catherine (Rio Notra Segal) are said couple, who have eloped and gotten married, much to the chagrin of Catherine’s mother. Michael’s name is a dirty word to the virginal Catherine’s family after he drunkenly kissed her sister once. It’s clearly still a bone of contention for Catherine too, as the newlyweds fight about it as soon as they leave the church.
Illicit snogs with family members are put on the backburner though, when Michael’s car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and they’re forced to walk miles for the nearest help. Stumbling across an ‘abandoned castle’, Michael insists that they should seek shelter and stay the night. Despite a sense of uneasiness, Catherine agrees and it’s not long before she begins to think that they should have at least tried to find an Airbnb.
It’s clear Sirkissoon loves his horror tropes. The Castle opens with a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in Friday the 13th, as a group of student stereotypes get their comeuppance after having the audacity to camp where a masked killer lurks. Later, as Catherine walks around the titular castle’s empty corridors, Sirkissoon shifts gears into a more psychological aesthetic, where anything could be prowling around the corner.
It’s just a shame then that The Castle works neither as a slasher nor a psychological thriller. The director, lead actor and – oh yes – composer’s spirit is strong, but the flesh of the film is weak. Red flags fly with the supposed abandoned castle, which is so well lit, the audience can see shiny red extinguishers and fire exit signs on walls so regularly, that it undermines the narrative that no one lives there. A better use of framing and lighting would perhaps have mitigated these issues, which really do pull you out of the moment.
As too does the arrival of our masked killers, whose voices are so muffled and vocoded, subtitles are needed to understand what is being said. This isn’t a dig at the actors’ enunciation; Sirkissoon uses literal (often misspelt) subtitles whenever they talk.
Sure, The Castle is a low budget affair, so the argument goes that – as with many horror flicks – you should try to ignore the rougher edges. However, the issue here is that The Castle feels like a penultimate draft of a film. One which needed just another pair of fresh eyes to pick up on the issues that overshadow what Sirkissoon was trying to achieve. With Sirkissoon’s name appearing as much as it does in the end credits, it’s not hard to assume that he was a little too close to his project.
There’s good chance a film like this will pick up an audience through word of mouth and midnight screenings, but taken at face value, it’s a disappointment.
