BLACK CIRCLE – I’ve never been hypnotised. ‘Black Circle’ is about the potential dangers of hypnotic records put out by Swedish new age cults from the nineteen seventies. It starts with one of those weird Op-Art based optical illusions that you’re supposed to stare at for a minute or so, then look away at something else and watch it go all swirly. That works because then the film cuts to a shot of a horizontal corpse, which ends up looking pretty mashed if you’ve done the eye thing correctly. ‘Black Circle’ follows the difficult path of Celeste (played by Felice Jankel), who is trying to rescue her sister from all the weird shit wrought by this disastrous new age mind control record. It’s quite non-linear, especially near the start, and splices coolly rendered passages of low-key Euro angst with trippy visuals and ersatz seventies cinema reels of mindf*ck experiments, a jarring concoction that settles down a little after we meet aging hippie and evil record progenitor Christina Lindberg (just don’t call her One Eye, not these days) and her cronies, two of whom appear to be randomly psychic. It culminates in a drawn-out trance ritual that feels a bit like a poorly managed deep relaxation session at first, but then blossoms into the most mesmerising stretch of weirdness I’ve seen since I last watched the third season of ‘Twin Peaks’. Yes, maybe I lied about it getting more sensible. I like any film that genuinely doesn’t care about whether it makes itself understood or digestible or not, and I really like ‘Black Circle’. I’m not convinced it entirely ‘works’, but since I’m not completely aware of what’s going on with it for half the time, I can’t really say. Its oddity has the feeling of inner conviction about it, I think I can say that. Aesthetically, whether we’re talking about the weird visuals or not, it’s very nice. Director Adrian Garcia Bogliano made the quite feted ‘Late Phases’, a werewolf movie from last decade that is narratively more satisfying than ‘Black Circle’ but several leagues away in terms of uncanny weirdness. Give ‘Black Circle’ a spin if you’re into freaky movies that are mostly about ‘feel’.
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