Ma was a serious Shirley Jackson fan, and I remember trying to read this one when I was a kid, but I was still into Dr. Doolittle and the Hardy Boys at the time, and this gothic tale about two reclusive sisters living in a fortresslike mansion with their dotty uncle was a bit above my pay grade. One thing that stayed with me was this taunting nursery rhyme, which is all we get as a backstory for a while: "Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea? Oh no, said Merricat, you'll poison me."

Stacie Passon's film adaptation of Jackson's novel is brilliant, visually and dramatically. I don't know whether the decision to film on the east coast of Ireland was esthetic or economic, but the acid greens and phosphorescent yellows of the rain-soaked woods furnish the perfect backdrop for Merricat's obsessive rituals, burying coins and magic charms while chanting protective spells. Taissa Farmiga, now in her mid-twenties, gives a fine spooky performance as the elflike teenage Merricat, and bodacious Alexandra Daddario gets to stretch a bit more than she did in "Baywatch," I'm guessing, as elder sister Connie, who floats dreamily through a fantasy of gracious country living, baking pies in the kitchen and pottering in the garden. Connie can only venture a few steps from their door--for reasons we can only guess at initially--so Merricat makes a weekly trip to town, enduring the taunts and threats of the locals (at least one of whom seems to have a valid grievance).

Jackson's novel is, essentially, a tale told by a psychopath. It's also a tale of WASPy repression, since the decisive events in the sisters' lives are something they never speak of--Merricat ties up the loose ends for us in voiceover as she writes in her journal. Fans of the genre won't be surprised when a disrupter turns up, a smarmy cousin who tempts Connie with fantasies of an Italian honeymoon. The psychic bond between the sisters is threatened, and for the second time in their lives, one of them (no spoilers here!) is required to step up and take care of business.

"Castle" seems close to a perfect film, though limited by the conventions of the gothic genre. The sisters' emotional responses are overdetermined by the usual murky "family secrets," and the climax reveals how, as in Jackson's canonical story "The Lottery," they've been made scapegoats for the suppressed violent impulses of an entire community. It's interesting to compare this one (favorably) with a showoffy formal exercise like "Stoker," which also owes a lot to Jackson's novel, but where color coding the sets and costumes seems to have been more of a priority than developing the relationships among the characters.