A relic from the 1970s—a self-help record which aims to teach the listener to “reach your full potential”—sparks terrifying chaos for two sisters in Black Circlea 2018 horror film worth seeking out now that it is streaming on Trembling.
Made in Sweden by Spanish writer-director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (2022's). The Exorcist), Black Circle You're thrown right into the woo-woo by opening with a film clip purportedly taken from a correspondence course marketed by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research.” The technique it pushes is a kind of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and its claims are incredible. Who wouldn't want to become the best version of themselves simply by clearing away all the bad energy and intrusive thoughts they've held onto since childhood?
It's a tempting proposition for Celeste (Felice Jankell), a twentysomething whose life is currently spiraling down the existential drain. She just broke up with her boyfriend and got fired from her summer job, and writer's block has prevented her from starting a long overdue school paper. So when her sister Isa (Erica Midfjäll)—whom she hasn't seen in a while—invites her to his office, Celeste is impressed by Isa's big-shot work and upbeat attitude. Things are going well, Isa tells her, and she wants to help Celeste change her own life.
Although Celeste is a bit annoyed with her pushy sister, that turns to confusion when Isa hands her a record and tells her to “play the B-side while you sleep.” The effects were life-changing, he promised, and they all came from a strange LP he found in the trash left by “grandma's cousin Lundstrom,” who until her passing was the only living relative of orphaned sister. Celeste is skeptical of what it's like to have a cult come over, but she gives it a spin. The next morning, he sat up straight, ran to his laptop, and successfully flipped through his paper page after page.
Naturally, there is a catch to this miraculous good fortune, and as Black Circle Building towards showing exactly what that catch looks like, the film divides itself into short chapters, not unlike a correspondence course. It also jumps back to the film-within-a-film to layer in some exposition about “magnetic hypnosis,” delivered in optimistic terms that don't match the increasingly uneasy results we see with the sisters. . The technique guides a person to offload the mental baggage that is holding them back—but once removed, said baggage takes the form of an “Ethereal Double,” a kind of doppelganger that gradually takes on more energy from its original source.
That was disturbing enough even before Black Circle introduces another layer of mythology, involving beings who intervene if an Ethereal Double becomes too comfortable in the human realm. That's one aspect of the story that doesn't get enough fleshing out, but Black Circle is otherwise deeply invested in its subversion of New Age psychology. As their lives are strangled by paranoid delusions that might be real, Isa and Celeste track down the woman who released the record, a psychic who suffers her own tragedy learning the harmful effects of magnetic hypnosis—and acts savagely to help. its latest victims.
Although the “reverse exorcism” ritual that replaces the third act of the film is somewhat halting, Black Circle has a unique energy and self-assured, often psychedelic visual style that allows it to carve out a unique space in the realm of cursed-media films. But unlike the characters in, for example, The Ring—watching a haunted video tape for entertainment, unaware that it will seal their doom— Black CircleThe sisters intentionally, though naively, open themselves up to LP's mind-altering abilities. The resulting journey brings a lot of fear, but it is also illustrative Black CircleThe deepest theme: you need to do the work necessary to overcome the negativity that has accumulated in your life, instead of hoping for a cure just by wishing the bad thing away.
Black Circle is now streaming on Shudder.
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