Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy sleeping in the corner over there know about. This is the place where we find underappreciated indie films and we make sense of them. Today? We are doing a deep dive on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a movie so quietly, unhurriedly unhinged that the people who greenlit it probably still aren’t sure what they watched.
Before we go any further: everything from this point forward is a full spoiler. The ending, the murders, who did what and why, all of it. If you haven’t seen the film yet, close this tab and go find it, because what I’m about to do is crack this thing open like a walnut and spread it across the table, and there’s no putting it back together afterwards. You’ve been warned in the plainest possible terms.
The Movie We Have Always Lived in the Castle Walkthrough
Three people live on the Blackwood estate when the film opens. You have Merricat, eighteen years old, played by Taissa Farmiga with this specific flavor of feral calm that should have had people talking about her in award conversations and largely didn’t. You have Constance, the older sister, played by Alexandra Daddario. And you have Uncle Julian, sick, rambling, anchored to a wheelchair and to his own looping account of something terrible that happened six years ago. Merricat despises going into the village for groceries because the village despises the Blackwoods right back. Constance hasn’t left the estate since she was tried and acquitted for murdering her parents. And Merricat has constructed her own private system of sympathetic magic, burying stolen objects around the property to ward off the malice of the outside world.
That is your setup. A small, airtight, rotting world, and two women who have decided they prefer it this way.
The Story Behind the Story of We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Now, before we get any further into the mechanics of the story, let me tell you what this film actually is, from a production standpoint, because it matters. A Shirley Jackson adaptation with this level of tonal specificity, this much deliberate refusal to explain itself or comfort its audience, arriving at this budget tier with this cast, that’s a film that survived something. Films like this don’t get made without someone in the room fighting for them at every single turn, because the natural gravitational pull of the development process is always toward clarity, toward legibility, toward a third act that explains what the second act meant. The fact that We Have Always Lived in the Castle ends the way it ends, with no catharsis, no confession, no redemptive arc, just two women sealing themselves happily inside their own ruin, means the director, Stacie Passon, held the line somewhere that a lot of directors don’t. You can feel the places where the pressure to over-explain must have been enormous. The film doesn’t blink. That’s the whole ballgame, right there.
The Story of We Have Always Lived in the Castle Continued
Back to the story. Constance has one regular visitor, a woman named Helen Clarke, who comes for tea once a week and periodically attempts to convince Constance that she should rejoin the world. Merricat regards this campaign with something just past contempt and just short of murderous intent, and responds to it the only way she knows how, which is magic. Her magic, her buried symbols and stolen objects, her cryptic rituals. Then their cousin Charles arrives.
Charles is not complicated. He wants the Blackwood family fortune, which is sitting in a safe in the house, and Constance is the obstacle between him and it, not in the sense that she’s resisting him, but in the sense that she’s charmed by him, which means he has to be charming long enough to get what he came for. He is cruel to Merricat and kind to Constance, and Constance, who has spent six years seeing almost no one, responds to kindness the way a person does when they haven’t had enough of it. Merricat escalates. She tears up his room. She speaks to him only in the names of poisonous plants, which is its own kind of threat if you know what to listen for. She throws everything off his desk into the trash, including his lit pipe, which catches the room on fire.
The fire department comes. And then the village comes with them. And the village, which has simmered for six years on hatred and fear and the particular resentment that small communities develop toward anyone who refuses to participate in them, decides this is their moment. They demand the house burn. They trash what the fire hasn’t taken. They are two minutes away from turning on the sisters directly when Helen Clarke’s husband steps in front of them and tells them that Julian Blackwood has died of smoke inhalation, and somehow that breaks the spell, the mob needs a reason to stop and he’s just given them one, and they leave.
The sisters spend the night in the woods. The next day they barricade the doors as best they can. A few villagers come back with food and something resembling an apology, and the sisters say nothing. Charles comes back and forces his way inside and begins attacking Constance, and Merricat beats him to death with a snow globe, and they bury him in the garden. The film loops back to where it started. Two children from the village come to taunt them through the ruined house. Merricat walks outside and the children run. She comes back in. Constance tells her she loves her. Merricat smiles for the first time in ninety minutes. Credits.
Yes. That’s the ending. No, there isn’t more.
What Actually Happened Six Years Ago??
The film is deliberately opaque about this, and the book, Shirley Jackson’s novel, fills in the gaps more directly through Uncle Julian’s rambling testimony. So here is what happened, assembled from both.
The Blackwood family was poisoned at dinner. Arsenic, placed in the sugar bowl. John and Ellen Blackwood, the parents, died. Their son Thomas died. Uncle Julian survived but was permanently damaged. Constance survived because she didn’t put sugar on her blueberries.
The village and the authorities went after Constance for it because she was the one who didn’t eat from the sugar bowl and she was the one who cooked the meal and she was eventually acquitted because she demonstrably didn’t have the knowledge of poisons that the method required. Merricat wasn’t at dinner that night. She’d been sent to her room as punishment for something. So she couldn’t have done it.
Except she did it.
Work through what the film gives you. Merricat grew up obsessed with nature, with the properties of plants, with the specific mechanics of what kills and what heals and what wards off harm. She knew which plants were poisonous because she talks about them constantly, uses their names as weapons, thinks in their vocabulary. She knew exactly who put sugar on their blueberries and who didn’t, because she grew up at that table watching. She poisoned the family to stop the abuse, to free Constance from a father the film makes clear was grinding her down, and to seal the two of them inside the estate together, permanently, safe from the outside world. She placed the arsenic in the sugar bowl precisely because it would kill everyone except the one person she wanted to survive.
The tell that the film gives you, the moment that closes the loop completely, comes when the sisters are hiding in the woods after the mob has torn through the house. Merricat says she wants to poison everyone in the village. And Constance’s response makes clear, quietly, without confrontation, that she already knows. She’s always known. She knew six years ago. She stood trial for it, absorbed the village’s hatred for it, built her entire reclusive life around protecting a sister she knew was a murderer, because the alternative was losing her.
That’s the relationship at the center of this film. Not a mystery, a complicity. Two women who have made a deal with each other that neither one will ever name out loud.
The Competing Theories to Explain the Film
There are really two ways people come at the ending of this film, and both of them are worth laying out honestly.
Theory Number 1: The first read is the one the film most directly supports, Merricat poisoned the family deliberately, with full understanding of what she was doing and full understanding of who would be spared. The magic is a coping mechanism, a way of exerting control over a world that frightened her. The arsenic was the one time the magic was real. On this read, Merricat is a killer who has constructed an elaborate private mythology to make herself the protector rather than the destroyer, and Constance is her willing accomplice in that mythology because the alternative is grief and prison and a world she’s already decided she can’t live in.
Theory Number 2: The second read, which is softer and which I think the film doesn’t quite earn but which exists in the Jackson novel more clearly, is that Merricat is genuinely dissociated from what she did, that the magic and the ritual and the compulsive boundary-drawing are not just coping mechanisms but evidence of a mind that has absorbed and processed the act of murder in a way that doesn’t register as murder anymore. On this read she isn’t hiding guilt so much as she has genuinely reorganized reality around the absence of it. The smile at the end, the first real smile in the whole film, lands differently depending on which of these you believe.
Where Moviesoapbox Comes Down on We Have Always Lived in the Castle
The first read. Completely. The precision of what Merricat did, the arsenic in the sugar bowl, the specific knowledge that Constance alone would survive it, the way she talks about poisons throughout the film not as botanical curiosity but as a native language, that’s not dissociation. That’s a girl who knew exactly what she was doing and has spent six years watching the world try to blame her sister for it and feeling nothing except gratitude that her plan worked.
The magic is real to her. But it was always in service of a very material goal. She wanted to live in the castle with her sister forever, sealed off from everyone and everything that threatened that. She looked at the tools available to her and she chose the one that actually works. Everything since has just been maintenance.
Constance’s “I love you” at the end isn’t relief. It’s the confirmation of a sentence. They are staying. They are together. The world burned down around them and they are still here. That’s what Constance is telling her. That’s why Merricat smiles. The plan worked. It just took six years to fully resolve.
This film got made because someone cared about Shirley Jackson’s novel enough to refuse to sand it down into something palatable, and because Taissa Farmiga is doing something genuinely strange and controlled in that lead performance that holds the whole increasingly dark construction together. The village that wanted to burn the house down, they’re not just antagonists. They’re the audience surrogate. The film’s last gesture is to tell you that the people who wanted to destroy these women were afraid of the right thing, and that the women survived anyway, and that this is somehow, in the film’s own warped register, a happy ending.
That’s what under-the-radar indie filmmaking can do when nobody forces it to explain itself. Go find this one if you haven’t. It earns the discomfort.