Monday Movie ~ Circle

Saturday evening's viewing fare for us included an indie film available via Netflix: Circle. It's one of the most frustrating yet potentially very interesting movies I've seen lately. There's no scenery to speak of, one "special effect" and a group of 50 actors standing in circular formation throughout...until their demise that is.

We're left to guess what's going on - as are the actors' characters who have arrived in this huge space by some unknown event none can clearly recall. There's a sci-fi element, a Twilight Zone flavour and even, at times, a vague touch of the ol' X-Files. Scully or Mulder would have been a very welcome addition to help sort out the plot for us!

The film's 50 characters, we find, are being executed at the rate of one every two minutes. Why? By whom? Group members have their own idea, based on memory flashes, that some kind of abduction has taken place. Was it alien abduction or otherwise though? And again, why?

The characters quickly come to understand that they themselves are able to control who is next to be executed. I was probably slow on the uptake, but never did find out how this part worked. The people somehow controlled the executions by clenching a hand into a fist and pointing...or "voting". The interest, and point of the movie is in the arguments and deductions the group put forward in choosing who will die next. Politics, religion, race, age, sexual orientation, immigrants, truth-telling - all the big issues are brought up, briefly, and used.

As 50 thins out to 40, 30, 20 and less, it dawns on the survivors that one person will survive in the end only if.....well, I'll leave it there and refrain from revealing the ending - which itself offers only clues.

I guess the film purports to present a snapshot of human nature, as found in Los Angeles of 2015 - that's where the movie is set, by the way. One character suggests that the group, captured by extra-terrestrial beings, is being used to study human values. I didn't find that premise believable. Alien beings would a) have to have certain human characteristics to have devised this grotesque set-up; and b)would have had to be highly intelligent and skilled enough to travel to Earth from - wherever - and would have more sense than to set up some kind of Big Brother or Survivor cheesy TV show scenario - or so I would hope!

My guess, at first, was that this was the brainchild of some future US government, to winnow the nation's population, so that only one in 50 would survive. That was a wrong guess - unless (another guess) the perpetrators had come from a future Earth, had travelled back in time.

Something that occurred to me while typing this post: the film's broad content, minus any sci-fi element, could act as a metaphor for our real-life voting exercises - elections, and how we make our choices, and why.

Husband and I both decided that the film's core idea was a good one, but that the movie could have been improved with a tiny bit (not too much) of explanation, either at the film's outset or by its ending.