Circle Review (Film, 2015) The Archives
In Circle, a random selection of 50 strangers are forced to compete in a deadly game. They wake up, standing, on a game board filled with circles and arrows. If they step off their circle, they’re killed by the glowing black ooze in the center of the room. Every two minutes, a drumbeat picks up and one of the strangers is killed. The contestants must figure out the rules of the game if they have any hope of escaping alive.
Writers/directors Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione take a fairly typical deadly game scenario and actually commit to a bottle story. The set is comprised of the one room. There are no visible walls. Everything is black, red, or white except for the strangers in the game. The sound design is limited to dialogue, screams, thuds, and the mechanics of the game itself.
This is the level of commitment necessary to make the ever-expanding deadly game genre seem fresh and interesting again. The players realize fairly quickly that whatever is controlling the game wants only one person to walk out alive. Much of the tension in Circle comes in equal parts from the contestants testing out their theories about how the game works and from the valuation of human life based on wildly conflicting social values.
Everyone wants to survive the game. It’s a question of who can make the most convincing argument within the unidentified rules of the game. An early decision has the contestants buying time by agreeing to kill off the oldest contestants around the circle. Everyone but the senior citizens are on board until the younger contestants demand to go backwards in age until all the rules are defined. Then factions begin to form and the strategies really come out.
Perhaps the only major flaw in Circle is how long Hann and Miscione wait for the decisions in Circle to go against the discussion being held. A tie always creates a good bit of tension, but the discussion focused on one contestant who is then killed by a clear majority grows tired quickly. You’re well past the halfway point before the non-vocal contestants seem to have a real say in how the game goes down.
Circle is a case study in simplicity. Commit to a horror concept, execute it to the best of your abilities, and let the audience ride along with whatever ideas you want to discuss. There are no clear monsters or heroes in the game. Your own beliefs will guide your opinions of the life or death debates that break out in Circle. Perhaps the scariest thing of all is seeing how easily people are swayed on their firmly held beliefs when faced with the threat of imminent demise.
