Castle Rock

Year of release : 2018

 

Run time : 35-60min, 10 episodes

 

Genre : Psychological Supernatural Horror / Mystery / Thriller / Mini Series / Tv Series

 

Cast : Bill Skarsgard, Sissy Spacek

 

 

The series are based on Stephen King's writings.

 

 

Season 1

 

 

In 1991, 11 year old Henry Deaver went missing for 11 days,in the winter cold. When he comes back, his father, a reverend, is dead, and he says he has no memory of what happened, and people think he killed his father while they went missing.

 

In the present, Lacy, the warden of a prison, kills himself with a rope around his neck while he drives the car into a lake.

 

Under a new warden, the police officers check the prison, and find a young man locked in a cage underground, in an area of the prison which is out of use, in what seems to be a water tank.

The man gives Henry Deaver's name.

 

Henry Deaver is a lawyer who made his life purpose to get people in Texas off the death row.

 

After a police officer at the prison makes an anonymous call, he comes to Castle Rock, an almost abandoned small town.

 

Weird things start happening to the police officer who called Henry, as he sees one night, on the cameras of the prison surveillance room, the man getting out of jail, and everybody dead.

 

Henry comes to Castle Rock, and finds his mother who suffers from Alzheimer's under the care of the cop who found him when he was a kid, wandering on the frozen Castle Lake.

People don't like him, as they think he killed his father,the man who adopted him, and lies he doesn't remember what happened.

 

In jail, the warden tells him the man who called him doesn't exist.

The cop who saved him,and now lived with his mother, tells him Lacy was a good man, and told him God showed him where and how to trap the devil, to make the evil things happening in Castle Rock,stop.

 

Molly is an empath with telepathic abilities. She can hear people's thoughts or more like, hear what they and others said to them when she wasn't there, and know their whole history. Henry to her has the strongest signal, as she can't focus on anything around him,as his "thoughts" which she calls "his song" are very loud. She medicates herself so she won't hear people's "noise". She was also the one who "helped" the reverend die.

 

Henry doesn't seem to remember anything about the time when he was lost for 11 days .

 

Shawshank prison wants to strike a deal with Henry and his client, the "boy" imprisoned by Lacy, but Henry wants to take them to court.

 

People think Henry ran away from home, but so far, it looks like his father took him on a trip in the woods at 2 o'clock in the morning, one winter night,to hear something.

 

Turns out the reverend thought he could hear God's voice, and he was taking his son out on forest night walks to hear it.

 

The "boy" is released from jail, and turns out the former cop recognizes him, as he never aged! Also, Lacy might have been correct about him, as since he's out, bad things happen, like forest fires, people who are happy turn evil and kill each other while in his presence, and he might be the one who turned the cop who helped him, insane.

 

My favorite episode so far, was the 7th,in which Sissy Spacek's character,who has dementia, is losing herself to the memories, and the whole episode she walks from memory to memory,trying to come back to reality, the present, through the bread crumbs she left for herself all around the house, her favorite Viking chess statues.

 

And the 9th,in which we get to see The Kid's side of the story. He says he is Henry Deaver, the child the reverend had, who, in a parallel universe,didn't die. He wants to go home,to his timeline, as he was trapped in this one, when this Henry went into his world.

This reminded me of Fringe and the idea that what doesn't belong in a universe,is causing it to collapse(in Fringe it didn't turn people homicidal and the birds suicidal, it thinned the fabric of the universe,creating black holes or portals,the universes colliding into each other,because it's against the laws of physics for two objects,in Castle Rock's case, the 2 Henry Deaver, to occupy the same space at the same time. Because of this, impossible events were made possible. ).

 

Episode 10 was a let down to me, as it comes to go head to head with the 9th and nothing makes sense. It was like the writers didn't check each other's story. Even at the beginning of episode 10, what Sissy's character says about time, goes to prove the Kid told the truth, but then the story takes a turn which makes no sense!

Episode 9 was told from the Kid's point of view, and even as an untrusty narrator (as they wanted us to believe in episode 10), we saw his life, we saw him trying to find a cure for his mother's disease, we saw him with the woman he loved trying to have a baby, so it didn't look fabricated. In such movies, when a character lies, we either don't see what he is talking about, or we see what really happened.

 

SPOILERS I'm thinking maybe they wanted to say the kid was evil and he was the entity from The Storm of the Century, who when he came to the town, people started killing each other,while he stayed locked in a cage with a smirk on his face. But it failed on delivery as they painted a different picture in the previous episode.

 

One thing I didn't understand and bothered me, is how can someone survive in a small cage,in complete darkness,being fed,probably, once a day, for 27 years,like the Kid! The health problems from muscle atrophy to mental illness,alone, should be well settled in, not to mention what this would do to his eyes, and other parts of his body due to the lack of sunlight ( chronic diseases like diabetes,high blood pressure, tuberculosis ). Also, there was nothing there to prove he bathed. Can one survive without cleaning themselves for 27 years?

Also, he was caged in a part of the prison which was out of use, which means no heating. There's no way one would survive under such conditions for so long! This is torture! Physical and mental.

And also,the not aging part,which also happened to the other Henry,is weird.

 

The actors were all good, my favorite were Sissy Spacek and Bill Skarsgard.

 

The soundtrack was good, so were the visual effects.

 

The movie is labeled as a supernatural horror, but I didn't see anything horror in it, until the last episode when they show us a distorted version of the kid.

 

The series are streaming on Hulu and HBO Max, and are for sale on Amazon, Apple, Google, Vudu.

 

Rating : It's so money!, I would have given it a higher rating if it wasn't for the huge season finale let down.