"Castle of Purity takes its title from an Octavio Paz essay on Marcel Duchamp and takes its basic situation from an actual case of a man who, for 18 years, kept his acquiescent wife and three children locked inside his house to insulate them from worldly corruption. What (Ripstein) knew of the real case was hardly more than that...So, in all its salient details (the children are optimistically called Utopia, Future and Will Power, the family business is the manufacture of homemade rat poison, on a pantry assembly line staffed by the children, etc.), the script is the product of impure imagination-morbid, unquenchable, unflinching...(Ripstein has Buñuel's) entomologist's eye. His characters, specially chosen for their tantalizing array of obsessions, fetishes, paradoxes, are looked upon as an exotic species, and unquestionably as a lower order...(their) decaying house a sort of exotic, jungle outpost in an imaginary wilderness...(He has) a Peeping Tom's stillness...His cool curiosity, in league with the outrageousness of the material, yields a murderous deadpan humor. (And he has) a dreamer's acceptance." --Duncan Shepherd, The Reader