For the inaugural movie review, I landed on Circle, a 2012 psychological thriller, not to be confused with The Circle, a 2017 thriller starring Emma Watson and Tom Hanks. This one had been on my Netflix list for a long, long time so I figured it would be a good one to open with. I figured wrong. I wish I had found a better movie to start with, but such is life. On the surface the premise is interesting enough and is what sucked me in. A group of 50 strangers wake up in a dark room. Of course there are other twists but they start being killed off one by one.
When the movie opens, all the characters wake up standing in a circular formation. They are each standing within a red circle with a series of triangles in the center of the room (also, of course, arranged in a circle). They quickly discover they are not allowed to move off their circle as one person who attempts to is killed by a beam of light shot from a dome in the middle of the room. Amid panic, another dies. They soon figure out that it doesn’t have to be random; they can vote for who dies. Each person has, by way of moving one of their hands, control over moving a light on the triangle pieces. Making a fist locks in their vote. The twist here is that each person can only see where their own vote goes. They stress this point more than once. But then when the plot needs it, certain people in the group can pinpoint exactly who someone else voted for. They only have two minutes between votes, making it difficult to try to figure out what’s happening or to come up with a strategy for determining who to kill next. They try to find loopholes but getting by on a loophole wouldn’t make for a very good movie so obviously they don’t work. The rest of the movie focuses on the remaining people trying to figure out the most ethical way to go about deciding who to kill. Or to think of it another way, they try to decide which of them gets to live. They surmise that whoever is the last one standing will get to live. Of course lies and manipulation abound as everyone tries to talk their way out of certain death. They try a few different strategies. Among others, they try not voting, voting for themselves, and tying the vote. When they don’t vote, someone is killed at random. They are not allowed to vote for themselves. On a tie vote, they must vote again or each person involved in the tie vote dies. Each person who tied is lit up by a yellow beam of light so everyone knows the choices on the re-vote.
The next part is where the spoilers come in.
Spoiler - Click to expand
The group eventually divides into two factions. There is a young child and a pregnant woman in the group. One side sees allowing one of them to be the one to live as the only morally acceptable outcome. The other wants to get rid of them. They all want to live and as long as those two remain, everyone else is two spots lower in the pecking order. There is some back and forth but eventually it comes down to the young girl, the pregnant woman, and a young man named Eric. Eric had been supportive of allowing the young girl or pregnant woman to be the one to survive. He says he will sacrifice himself and then the last two will have to decide who between them will get to live. The young girl, Katie, says she will also sacrifice herself so that the mother-to-be will have a chance to live and raise her child. She’s unsurprisingly very nervous about it. Eric tries to reassure her, telling her they will do it together. As she steps off her circle, Eric quickly votes for the pregnant woman. They both die, leaving Eric as the “winner.” Or so he thinks.
As he’s waiting for something to happen to show that he will survived and it’s over, the yellow light covers him as well as the pregnant woman’s womb. Whoever is doing this (spoiler alert within the spoiler: it’s aliens. Because of course it is) is forcing Eric to either kill an unborn child or to sacrifice himself to save it. Even though it would then still be in the womb of a dead woman? I don’t know, I guess the aliens had a plan if that were to happen? Whatever, it seems weird anyway because we’ve already previously seen that if there are not votes cast, someone dies at random. So either the aliens have special rules for the final two, have special rules if the final two involves the unborn child who of course can’t vote, or this simply made for a better plot twist. The smart money’s on that last one. The shot focuses on Eric’s hand and before you can see his choice, the screen cuts to black. We next see Eric wake up on the street, having been released from wherever they were being held. You see an alien ship hovering in the sky. Eric walks over to a group of people staring at the ship. And that’s the movie.
I do want to touch on the other people Eric sees at the end. It’s mostly pregnant women and young children, with a few other adults such as Eric. Seemingly, we’re being told there were other groups like Eric’s and these people are those that survived their respective groups. There’s no need to discuss the other Eric-like adults. They either did what Eric did or just happened to somehow else be the last one. The kids and the pregnant women raise some questions, however. For the children, it’s certainly possible that every other person in their group chose to sacrifice themselves so that the child would have a chance at life. But given what happened in Eric’s group, I’d say it’s very likely that there were at least a couple of others that followed a similar path as his. Meaning that these kids may have been forced to choose to kill both a pregnant woman and her unborn child. Pretty morbid to think about.
As dark as that might be, it’s nothing next to what the pregnant women presumably had to go through. We know from Eric’s experience that the aliens considered the unborn children to be a valid member of the group. This means one of two likely scenarios had to play out, both with a pretty creepy end result. One, the group realized or guessed that they could kill the unborn child without killing the mother and did so. If that’s the case these women are walking around with dead fetuses in their wombs. Not cool. Scenario two. The pregnant woman was the last one left only to find out, just as Eric did, that in the aliens’ eyes, there were actually two people left. Each woman was then forced to choose between her own life and that of her unborn child. Since they are out in the street with everyone else, their choice is obvious. Again meaning they are walking around with a dead fetus in their womb. Again not cool. But hey, who knows. Maybe the aliens had other special rules and if the pregnant woman was the last person left alive, she got to live along with her child. So it’s either A) a pretty twisted ending or B) a sloppy ending because these aliens are wildly inconsistent with their rule enforcement.
Final Thoughts An interesting premise that didn’t go anywhere due to shortcomings on virtually all other aspects of the movie. Circle tries to be a social commentary by touching on hot button topics such as racism, sexism, and homophobia. But it treats them all like a checklist, just going from one to next so quickly that there is never any real effect of any given one. Having each person confined to their individual space, there was essentially no movement from the characters outside of some generic body language. With so little happening, it made it hard to stay focused as a viewer. Because of this the quality of the movie relied more heavily on the script and the acting. Obviously that’s always a factor, but it was more greatly emphasized here. And that wasn’t a good thing for this movie. One small positive is while much of Circle was quite predictable, it still managed to include a couple of nice twists.
Do I recommend it? To put it simply, no. But if you’re a big fan of this kind of movie, check out the trailer below. My guess is your impression of the trailer will match how you feel about the movie.
Alright, readers. What did I get right, what was I wrong about? Did I misinterpret the ending or are there alternate theories I haven’t considered? Sound off in the comments.
