Review of Circle (2015) by Ben L — 07 Jun 2016

Circle has a lot of massive flaws, but despite the negatives, it has a premise that is so strong I never gave up on it. The story is very simple to explain, although the setup where the characters deduce what is happening without ANY explanation is clunky and filled with unlikely leaps of logic. A simple voice explaining the rules would have made so much more sense, and would have been an extremely efficient way of getting the story rolling. The film is about fifty strangers who are all trapped in an alien room that kills one person every few minutes. The truly difficult part of this process is that the people can actually vote on who they want to be the next to go. The cast is loaded with a ton of no-name actors and sadly this means that there is a lot of bad, over-the-top performances in the film. A few good actors would be better than a multitude of average actors. There were just too many people altogether, which also meant it was hard to connect emotionally with most of the characters. Plus, the deaths were coming so fast that you couldn't follow why the votes shook out the way they did. I'm not saying that I needed to see every person's vote, but I just can't reconcile the logic of how certain people get enough votes to die.

Example: There are several scenes where one person is asking everyone to rally together and vote out another character. Well, logic dictates that either the person they are petitioning against or the one offering the plea will get the majority of the vote, but instead the movie shows a tie between one of the two obvious choices and another random person who hasn't even said anything. How would enough people randomly select that same quiet person in order to match the large number that would vote for ones involved in the discussion?

I'll also say that the large number of people led to a lot of repetition. As in any prolonged argument or debate, given enough time the same topics will start to pop up again and again. Likewise, for the sake of time (because we've got a lot of people to kill) the time between deaths seems to fluctuate with no apparent cuts in the film to justify those variances in the death machine's frequency. Circle would have excelled as a short film with a lot less people. Yet, despite a mountain of problems, I can't help but give the movie a passing grade. There's something so fascinating for me in watching a group of people debate and make horribly complex moral or logical decisions. It's like sitting back and watching one of the most intense games of Werewolf/Mafia ever played. You may not be all that invested in the people involved, you may not understand why they vote in certain ways, but you just have to watch to see what will happen next and how it will end. I also thought the ending was strong, and didn't have me grumbling "That's it?" I don't know if I can really recommend others subject themselves to Circle, but if you choose to watch it don't be surprised if you find yourself hooked in and watching to the bitter end.