A relic from the 1970s: personal help save purporting to teach the listener to “reach their full potential” – sparks frightening chaos for two sisters in Black circlea 2018 horror film that’s worth watching now that it’s streaming on Shudder.
Made in Sweden by Spanish writer-director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (2022 The Exorcist), Black circle throws you straight into the woo-woo by opening with a film clip purportedly taken from a correspondence course peddled by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research”. The technique he proposes is a kind of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and his assertions are fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to become the best version of themselves by simply purging all the bad energies and intrusive thoughts they’ve been holding on to since childhood?
It’s a tempting proposition for Celeste (Felice Jankell), a twenty-something whose life is currently teetering on the edge of an existential abyss. She just broke up with her boyfriend and was laid off from her summer job, and writer’s block has prevented her from starting a long-awaited school newspaper. So when her sister Isa (Erica Midfjäll), whom she hasn’t seen for a while, invites her to stop by her office, Celeste is impressed by Isa’s ambitious work and optimistic attitude. Things are going great, Isa tells him, and she wants to help Celeste change her life.
Although Celeste bristles a little at her pushy sister, this is replaced by confusion when Isa hands her a record and tells her to “play side B while you fall asleep.” The effects are life-changing, she promises, and they all come from this strange LP she found among the trash left behind by “Grandma Lundstrom’s cousin,” who until his death was the only other living relative orphaned sisters. Celeste is skeptical of what looks like a cult apparition, but she gives it a spin. The next morning, she sits up, sprints to her laptop, and triumphantly reads page after page of her journal.
Naturally, there is a catch to this miraculous luck, and as Black circle In an effort to show exactly what this take looks like, the film is divided into short chapters, much like a correspondence course would. He also returns to the film-within-a-film to add exposition about “magnetic hypnosis,” presented in optimistic terms that don’t match the increasingly disturbing results we see with the sisters. The technique guides a person in unloading the mental baggage that was holding them back, but once cleared, this baggage takes the form of an “ethereal double”, a kind of doppelganger that gradually draws more and more energy from its source original.
It’s already disturbing enough Black circle introduces another layer of mythology, involving creatures that intervene if an ethereal double gets too comfortable in the human realm. This is an aspect of the story that is not developed enough, but Black circle is otherwise deeply invested in its subversion of New Age psychology. As their lives are choked by paranoid delusions that might just be real, Isa and Celeste track down the woman who released the record, a psychic who experienced her own tragedy when she learned of the harmful effects of magnetic hypnosis – and who enters sinisterly in action to help. his last victims.
Even if the ritual of the “reverse exorcism” which takes place in the third act of the film drags on a little, Black circle possesses a unique energy and a confident, often psychedelic visual style, which allows him to carve out a unique place in the field of cursed media films. But unlike the characters, for example, The ring…who watch a haunted video tape for entertainment, without knowing that it would spell their doom – Black circleThe sisters of , although naively, intentionally open themselves up to the distorting capabilities of the LP. The resulting journey brings much terror, but it also illustrates Black circleThe deeper theme of: you must do the work necessary to overcome the negativity accumulated in your life, rather than hoping to heal by just wishing the bad things would go away.
Black circle is now streaming on Shudder.
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