Had it been a work of fiction, you’d have laughed it off. Seventeen year old Alan St. George met Adrianne Blue Wakefield through the window of a bus and knew she was his soulmate. He chased her until he won her over and then dedicated himself to their shared artistic vision by building an ornate castle in rural Illinois that housed them in a phantasmagoric world of their own making, cut off from the outside and indifferent to the disapproval of friends and family. He funded this with credit cards, multiple mortgages, and why not? an improbably successful mascot company.
And since her death at 55 in 2006, when Adrianne & the Castle director Shannon Walsh says he maintains it “like a monk in a temple,” still together. “We saw it ourselves,” Walsh says. “Alan was outside during one of the days we were filming, and suddenly all these little orbs of light starting sparkling around. There was no wind, no dust, there was no precipitation, it was just completely mysterious. He thinks she comes to him like that.”
Another one of many electrical anomalies experienced by the crew on set aside (as well as some possible interference with casting decisions, Adrianne is explicitly thanked “for guidance from the afterlife” in the credits), there’s SLee. “We were in Chicago,” Walsh remembers, “and we’d seen some great actresses but SLee came in and there was an electrical surge in the camera. Everyone felt like a wind had blown in the room. We thought we’d lost the footage. We were like OK is this Adrianne’s choice?”
If you’ve been following along so far I should tell you that at this point I am merely paraphrasing what has been told me about Adrianne & The Castle, which will open this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival at Vancouver Playhouse Theatre on May 4 before becoming available for streaming across Canada. Young Adrianne was eventually played by SLee after a search that weighed heavily on Alan, and it is with similar devotion to higher truths in the same spirit of the 71 year old widower who continues to live in and take care of Havencrest Castle that Walsh’s film colours outside the lines of what we’d traditionally think of as documentary.
“It’s kind of loosened up everything for me,” she tells Stir. “How to think about making films, how to think about creativity, taking risk, everything.” It’s easy to see why anyone would be head over heels for this tale of shared mania. In archival footage we glimpse Adrianne herself; one clear eyed observer likens her to “Madonna meets Alice Cooper.” “She made herself up like an alien,” says another. A talented artist, Alan would bring her visions into being, he turned their American Gothic detached home into a rococo warren that broke the laws of physics and included its own theatre.
Adrianne once said they came together because each had something the other needed: “I needed someone to believe all my stories were true. And he needed someone whose imagination could drag him out from where he was.”
Walsh conveys this as well as she can without losing sight of any part of it; watching Adrianne & The Castle feels like seeing an entire galaxy through a telescope.
‘You feel kind of dizzy in there, and it is too much for one pass-through,’ she said. ‘I was really inspired by Last Year at Marienbad. In that film you’re always disoriented. I wanted it to feel like you never knew where it began or ended, like you couldn’t get a grip on the space. That was very intentional. If you know your way around, we failed.’ The same could be said of Adrianne, which Walsh agrees is also intentional; there are hints of a fractured personality, but we’re somewhat lost without a larger attempt to psychologize this extraordinary person which is what you might otherwise expect from a documentary portrait.
‘There was a sense that Adrianne was always with us and opening some doors for us and keeping some doors closed. Laurel and I really took that seriously through the writing and through the research, really trying to tune in to whatever that was,’ says Walsh. ‘Early on I thought we should really figure it out, but Adrianne and Alan’s motto is “Reality is for those who lack imagination”, and if we open every door to see what’s behind it something felt almost disrespectful about that to me.’
It’s probably fair to say that Walsh did not finish Adrianne & the Castle with the straightforward film she first imagined when Illinois native Sprengelmeyer first introduced her to Alan St. George and Havencrest in 2017, whatever enchantment gripped her at first, their bond deepened when she lost her father during production in 2021, when shooting at Havencrest commenced, Walsh was visited by Adrianne and her father in a dream that she describes as ‘also not a dream’. Ultimately with its swooning style, gleeful excesses, fanciful musical sequences Adrianne & the Castle might be an extension of Havencrest itself.
‘People say this is not a political film like my other films,’ said Walsh, who was last seen at DOXA in 2021 with her vicious critique of the ‘platform economy’, The Gig Is Up. ‘But to me it really is. It came at a moment when I felt this kind of healing is exactly where we need to be, to understand the power of love and the creation of the worlds we want to live in, and processing grief to be here for that stuff and not just the rage, not just the disappointment or disillusionment or pessimism about where we are. I felt like I needed it anyway. And Alan really brought it. I think it’s a really special film.’
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