Castle of Purity · reception & legacy
1973 · Arturo Ripstein
How Castle of Purity has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A landmark on arrival — it announced Ripstein as a major voice in early-70s Mexican cinema — and it has only climbed since, now routinely ranked among the greatest Mexican films ever made and rediscovered abroad through restorations and streaming.
What's debated
The perennial fan debate: is this 'Dogtooth before Dogtooth'? — Letterboxd reviews endlessly relitigate how much Lanthimos's premise owes to Ripstein's film, made 36 years earlier.
Its footprint
Its scenario — a patriarch sealing his family off from a 'corrupting' world — has become the reference point for a whole lineage of locked-house cinema, so the film mostly circulates now as the thing people cite when they want to out-hipster a Dogtooth fan.
Where it stands
A canonical Mexican classic that plays as a cult discovery for everyone else — the archetypal 'why did nobody tell me about this' Letterboxd find.