A relic from the 1970s—a self-help record purporting to teach the listener to “reach your full potential”—stirs up frightening chaos for two sisters in Black Circle, a 2018 horror film that’s well worth seeking out now that it’s streaming on Shudder.
Made in Sweden by Spanish writer-director Adrián García Bogliano (2022’s La Exorcista), Black Circle plunges you right into the woo-woo by opening on a film clip purportedly taken from a correspondence course peddled by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research.” The technique it’s pushing is sort of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and its claims are fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to become the best version of themselves by simply purging all the bad energy and intrusive thoughts they’ve been clutching onto since childhood?
It’s a tempting proposition for Celeste (Felice Jankell), a twentysomething whose life is currently circling the existential drain. She’s just broken up with her boyfriend and been fired from her summer job, and writer’s block has prevented her from even starting a long-looming school paper. So when her sister Isa (Erica Midfjäll)—who she hasn’t seen in some time—invites her to stop by her office, Celeste is impressed by Isa’s big-shot job and upbeat attitude. Things are going wildly well, Isa tells her, and she wants to help Celeste turn her own life around.
Though Celeste bristles a bit at her pushy sister, that’s replaced by confusion when Isa hands her a record and tells her to “play the B-side as you fall asleep.” The effects are life-changing, she promises, and they all stem from this weird LP she found among junk left behind by “grandma’s cousin Lundstrom,” who until his passing was the orphaned sisters’ only other living relative. Celeste is skeptical of what feels like a cult come-on, but she gives it a spin. The next morning, she sits bolt upright, sprints to her laptop, and triumphantly pounds out page after page of her paper.
Naturally, there’s a catch to this miraculous good fortune, and as Black Circle builds toward showing exactly what that catch looks like, the film divides itself into short chapters, not unlike a correspondence course might. It also jumps back into 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 in offloading the mental baggage that’s been holding them back—but once expunged, said baggage takes the form of an “Ethereal Double,” a sort of doppelganger that gradually draws more and more energy from its original source.
© ShudderThat’s disturbing enough even before Black Circle introduces another layer of mythology, involving creatures that intervene if an Ethereal Double gets too comfortable in the human realm. That’s an 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 become choked with paranoid delusions that just might be real, Isa and Celeste track down the woman who released the record, a psychic who suffered her own tragedy in learning the harmful effects of magnetic hypnosis—and who grimly springs into action to help its latest victims.
Though the “reverse exorcism” ritual that takes over the film’s third act drags a bit, 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 instance, The Ring—who watch a haunted video tape for entertainment, not knowing it’ll seal their doom— Black Circle’s sisters intentionally, albeit naively, open themselves up to the LP’s mind-warping capabilities. The resulting journey brings plenty of terror, but it also illustrates Black Circle‘s deepest theme: you gotta do the work necessary to move past the negativity that’s accumulated in your life, rather than hoping to heal by just wishing the bad stuff away.
Black Circle is now streaming on Shudder.
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