The Castle of Purity

The reigning provocateur of Mexican cinema, Arturo Ripstein, first attracted an international audience with his breakout third feature—a claustrophobic, wet, and wickedly depraved deconstruction of the family unit. Based on a “true story” from the 1950s, which was also later the inspiration for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, The Castle of Purity is set mostly in the confined spaces of one house, where a violent and overprotective rat poison salesman (Buñuel regular Claudio Brook) has imprisoned his wife and children for eighteen years and is descending into madness. The Castle of Purity takes the patriarchal melodrama to its literal and bizarre extremes, blending the hysterics of masculinity-in-crisis dramas with startling violence and Buñuelian black humor.