4 out of 5

Directed by: Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione

Though understandably compared to Cube, I kept thinking moreso of Buried while watching Circle, given that they’re both completely reliant on their actor(s) ability to emote with little to no interaction with a set or external ephemera.  That being said, the movies are completely different experiences, although each logically twiddles the whole us-or-them paranoia.

Circle is miraculously basic, and effective in making its out-there set up pretty clear: 50 people wake up in a black room, arranged in a circle, standing on markings around a black orb.  Stepping off of the markings causes the orb to emit a deadly bolt to the offender, and periodically, a buzzing intones, after which another deadly bolt takes a victim.  After a couple rounds of this and the requisite panic, it’s realized that our 50 have the ability to vote on the orb’s target, and that such a vote will occur every two minutes.  And… go.

An hour and a half? you say; as I’m sure we all said.  But I was riveted, and that hour and a half goes by miraculously quickly without any cheating: there are no flashbacks or cutaways.  We’re stuck watching these folks debate what to do.

And that’s, sincerely, all there is to it.  The Cube concept is the sci-fi bent to things, but there’s much less philosophical claptrap to this, as our contestants get down to nitty gritty on… well, every conceivable point of view, all scripted rather, to my ears, believably, though thankfully leaning on more ‘intelligent’ versions of any given argument.

For better or worse, there can’t be much of a point to things beyond these interactions, which certainly limits the repeatability of viewings, but Circle is absolutely worth viewing once, and is a badass achievement in creating something that fills up its runtime more thrillingly and chillingly than countless movies that have more money and story than they apparently know what to do with.