“Circle” is easily one of the most pretentious films I’ve seen in some time.
The film starts by throwing the audience into a black room that slowly lights up revealing the set that looks like it was put together by a college production. Don’t worry though, you’ll only see this setting for the rest of its run time.
In the circular room are 50 people, who are all strangers, and one by one they are killed off until only one will remain. Sounds interesting, right? Well, it does until they deduce within two minutes of waking up in the room that they can vote for each other, but how they figured this out only the screenwriter will know.
The criteria for voting is what takes precedence for the rest of the film as people must decide who must be killed and why, so that only one will remain.
The reasons for why they kill people off are where this film really shines—I mean fails. And I mean fails. This film is a heaping pile of trash, with stereotypical characters that look they were taken straight from a cookie cutter.
For example, and believe me there are 50 of them, there is a racist police officer who gets into an argument with a black man about how minorities commit more crimes and thus police brutality should be justified. This goes nowhere because they just vote for the police officer to be killed and the topic is never brought up again.
And then there’s commentary that “addresses” a wide spectrum of issues including homosexuality, religious beliefs, age, violence against women, etc. All of these issues are discussed in under a minute before they disappear.
And nothing is ever subtle in this movie. While watching, I began to get a headache from being hit over the head with who everyone was and what they represented exactly. This movie even goes so far as to attempt to discuss “illegal aliens” by putting in a Latino man who can’t speak English, and to which they all ask his translator if he is here legally. This is why this film surpasses the realm of being a complete dumpster fire and becomes flat out annoying and irritating.
The actual screenwriting of this film is equally annoying, because lines are written in such a pretentious and faux intellectual diction that you can feel the screenwriters high-fiving themselves for what they thought was a brilliant concept.
The delivery of the lines also doesn’t help, with the ability of the 50 actors being all over the place. There are three actors and two actresses that I am willing to call professional. The others are rough to say the least, delivering lines as if they were told emoting would result in their immediate dismissal from the project. I can say with confidence that I’ve seen better acting from text to speech.
With so many shortcomings, what’s a positive you might ask? The only thing I’ll give this movie credit for is that they were able to keep the camera in focus. It’s honestly just a gigantic pile of garbage fermenting on Netflix.
The film thinks that it’s discussing a plethora of relevant and pointed social topics by paying lip service to them, but what discussing means to them I would liken to saying that I’ve dove the Mariana Trench after touching the crest of a wave 10,944 meters over it.
Please do not watch this movie. I cannot emphasize that enough. The only way I’d re-watch this film is if the runtime was trimmed by 87 minutes.
Rating: Simply NO