Circle – Good, Bad & Ugly Review


Rotten Tomatoes Rating: NA (Critics) / 90% (Audience)
Directed By: Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione
Written By: Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione
Starring: Julie Benz, Carter Jenkins, Jordi Vilasuso and Carter Jenkins
Studio: Taggart Productions
Synopsis: Held captive and faced with their imminent executions, fifty strangers are forced to choose the one person among them who deserves to live. – (Source)

circle

The Good:
The filmmakers deserve heaps of credit for how much suspense they were able to maintain throughout this entire film considering it was shot on one set that looked like something left over from the TV game show THE WEAKEST LINK.
And I really liked how nihilistic the vibe of the film was from how quickly everyone went from fear and confusion to deciding who deserved to live and die. And the swerve at the end was very well done.

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The Bad:
Some of the debating tended to fall into the preachy category and the actual ending really didn’t make much sense or add much to the film. Cutting off the extra 5 minutes would have been a better move.

cirlce1
The Ugly:
I understand that the characters in the film needed to figure out the rules of the game early on but it really did seem to happen a bit too quick and easy especially given the very little that the characters had to work with.

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Final Verdict: A movie that wrings a nice amount of tension out of the spartan setting and plays with notions of morality pretty well but all in all feels more like an episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (or an unfilmed segment from BLACK MIRROR) than an actual feature film. Definitely worth a viewing though.

Grade: C+

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