Circle (2015)

I wrote a think-piece a while ago about what makes something a ‘horror’ movie, because it seems to be a genre label that just gets attached to things that are the slightest bit scary. “Circle” (2015) is another great example of that:

50 people of every economic tier, race, creed, gender, age, and sexuality found themselves standing in two concentric rings of 25 small red circles. Through a few brief moments of trial and error, they discovered that they could each see their own voting arrow on the floor, and thus could vote for who the black orb in the middle of the room should kill next. No one could see anyone else was voting for, and thus their voting decisions boiled down to blind trust. People could volunteer to die by stepping out of their circle, and if no one was voted for someone would die randomly. When there was a tie, the vote was immediately re-cast or the orb killed both.

A haunting concept for sure, and one that absolutely wouldn’t sit well with anyone at any point if they were in that situation for real, but I wouldn’t call it horror.
‘Thriller’ or ‘suspense,’ certainly, but not horror.
I clearly do not understand what constitutes ‘horror’ as a genre.

This felt like the premise of an episode of “The Twilight Zone” (1959-1964) or “Black Mirror” (2011+), wherein a bunch of people found themselves in an inexplicable situation where the backstory of how they got there was of approximately zero value, as the key to the impact of the story was what the characters needed to do from there on out.

I suppose they could have tried to compress this into a 30 or 50 minute episode of someone else’s anthology, but the 87 minute run time actually worked out here – 80 of those minutes were solidly focused on the cast making their terminal decisions (the other 7 were for the final reveal and credits). Those 80 minutes were used to show the constantly-shifting politics of a rapidly shrinking crowd of people who all wanted to live, but none of them knew what exactly would keep them alive or why they’d been chosen to play this cursed game.

But more importantly: this movie asked us how we would behave. It’s really easy to say “sure, I’d sacrifice my life” or “it’s me, screw everyone else” in a hypothetical situation.
And yes, this movie was a movie, so it wasn’t exactly ‘for realsies,’ but it was a good approximation of how people would immediately throw away their morals and say anything they needed to if they thought it would get them ahead.
Like I mentioned in my review for “3022” (2019) – when you’re staring death in the face and the option is ‘you or them,’ the thin veneer of civility will fall away.

In some ways, it felt like an inverted take on “12 Angry Men” (1957), except instead of a dozen jurors debating whether or not one man on trial would die, it was 50 people trying to decide who else should die so it wouldn’t be them.

The special effects were almost non-existent: the entire movie took place in a room with red circles on the floor and white lights in the ceiling.

There was no music, as far as I remember.

If anything, this movie’s weakest link was its cast: all 50 actors seemed to be D-list nobodies, some of whom proved why they were in that tier. I will give them a pass though: the sometimes-clunky acting didn’t take away from the storyline or characters development.

I was, admittedly, concerned that they were going to botch the ending. I was worried that everyone would come back to life, or it would turn out to be a dream sequence, or some other stupid gimmick would get pulled out and ruin the intensity of the rest of the film and the weight of the deaths.
Fortunately, they avoided that for an ending with a nice clean reveal.
That said, I did have to look up an explanation for the ending to make sure I understood it right, so I’ll leave you with this: if you do watch it, pay close attention to who is in the very last scene.

I wouldn’t have wanted to pay to see it in theaters, as it wasn’t nearly that good; for something to stream from Netflix, it was a great 3-Claw movie.