Adrianne & the Castle opens DOXA with an otherwordly tale of love, grief, and opulence
Filmmaker Shannon Walsh turns her lens on a labyrinthian fantasy world and an all-consuming love that transcends death
Adrianne & the Castle.
DOXA presents Adrianne & the Castle at the Vancouver Playhouse on May 4 at 7 pm with a Q&A, and May 11 at 1:45 pm at Vancity Theatre
IF IT WAS fiction, you’d scoff. Teenaged Alan St. George first saw Adrianne Blue Wakefield through the window of a bus, in an instant recognizing his soulmate. After pursuing and winning her heart, he dedicated his life to their shared creative vision, building a breathtakingly ornate castle in rural Illinois that cradled the couple inside a phantasmagoric reality of their own making, untroubled by the outside world and impervious to the disapproval of family and community. He financed this through credit cards, multiple mortgages, and—what else?—an implausibly successful mascot company. And following her premature death at 55 in 2006, while he maintains the castle “like this monk in a temple” as filmmaker Shannon Walsh puts it, Adrianne and Alan are still together. Or so it would seem.
“We witnessed it ourselves,” says Walsh, director of Adrianne & the Castle. “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.”
There were other anomalous events experienced by the film crew, frequently electrical, and the possibility that Walsh and her team weren’t entirely in charge of the film’s casting decisions. Adrianne is explicitly thanked "for guidance from the afterlife” in the credits. “We were in Chicago,” Walsh recalls, "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, ‘Okay, is this Adrianne’s choice?’”
SLee was subsequently cast as Young Adrianne after a painstaking search that carried an enormous emotional delicacy for Alan, as viewers will see when Adrianne & the Castle opens this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre on May 4. Mirroring the devotion exhibited by the 71-year-old widower, who still resides in and caretakes Havencrest Castle, Walsh’s film colours outside the lines of conventional documentary in its faithfulness to higher truths.
“Somehow, it’s loosened up everything for me,” she tells Stir, calling from London, Ontario as she begins work on her next project. “How to think about making films, how to think about creativity, taking risk, everything.” It’s easy to see why anyone would be swept up by this giddy tale of folie à deux. In archival footage, we encounter Adrianne as a spectral, otherworldly woman whose greatest creation was herself. A skilled artist, Alan facilitated her visions, expanding their American Gothic detached home into a rococo, physics-defying labyrinth complete with its own theatre. One of the great pleasures of Adrianne & the Castle is the sense that Walsh’s camera is overwhelmed by the impossibilities it tries to capture.
“You kind of feel dizzy when you’re in there, and it’s too much for one go through,” she says. “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 were unable to grasp 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, no?
“There was a sense that Adrianne was always with us and opening some doors for us and keeping some doors closed. [Co-writer] Laurel [Sprengelmeyer] 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 Walsh at first, the bond with her subject was 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”. In the end, with its swooning style, gleeful excess, and 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,” says 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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