Black Circle Infuses The “Cursed Media” Genre With Psychic Horror

A relic of the 1970s – a self-help record claiming to teach the listener to “reach your full potential” – sparks terrifying chaos for two sisters in Black Circlea 2018 horror film worth seeking out now that it is streaming Frizz.

Directed in Sweden by Spanish writer-director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (2022). The exorcist), Black Circle he plunges you straight into the woo-woo by opening a video purportedly taken from a correspondence course sold by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research.” The technique he pushes is a sort of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and his claims are fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to become the best version of themselves by just taking away all the bad energy and intrusive thoughts they’ve been stuck with since childhood?

It’s a tempting proposal for Celeste (Felice Jankell), a twenty-something whose life is now circling the existential ditch. She just broke up with her boyfriend and got fired from her summer job, and writer’s block has prevented her from even starting a long-form school paper. So, when her sister Isa (Erica Midfjäll) – who she hasn’t seen in a while – invites her to come to her office, Celeste is impressed by Isa’s hard work and optimistic attitude. Things are going very well, Isa tells her, and she wants to help Celeste turn her life around.

Although Celeste gets a little irritated at her overbearing sister, this is replaced by confusion when Isa hands her a record and tells her to “play the B-side while you sleep.” The effects are life-changing, he promises, and they all stem from this strange LP he found among the junk left behind by “Grandma Lundstrom’s cousin,” who until his death was the only living relative of the orphaned sisters. Celeste is skeptical of what feels like a cult coming, but she gives it a push. The next morning, she sits up straight, sprints to her laptop, and triumphantly pulls out page after page of her paper.

Naturally, there is a catch to this miraculous good fortune, and how Black Circle Building towards showing exactly what the capture looks like, the film is divided into short chapters, not unlike a correspondence course. It also returns in the film-within-a-film to layer in some exposition on “magnetic hypnosis”, delivered in optimistic terms that do not match the increasingly disturbing results we see with the sisters. The technique guides a person in unloading the mental baggage that has been holding him back, but once removed, such baggage takes the form of an “Ethereal Double,” a kind of doppelganger that gradually draws more and more energy from the its original source.

It’s pretty disturbing even at first Black Circle introduces another layer of mythology, involving creatures who intervene if an Ethereal Double gets too comfortable in the human realm. It’s an aspect of the story that isn’t fleshed out enough, though Black Circle is otherwise heavily invested in his subversion of New Age psychology. As her life is clouded by paranoid delusions that could be real, Isa and Celeste track down the woman who published the record, a psychic who suffered her own tragedy to learn about the harmful effects of magnetic hypnosis – and who take action to help. their last victims.

Although the “reverse exorcism” ritual that takes up the third act of the film drags a bit, Black Circle it has a unique energy and a 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 example, The ring-who watch a haunted videotape for fun, not knowing it will seal their doom – Black CircleThe sisters intentionally, if naively, open themselves up to LP’s mind warping abilities. The resulting journey brings a lot of terror, but also illustrates Black Circlethe deeper theme of the: you must do the necessary work to pass the negativity that has accumulated in your life, rather than hoping to heal by just wishing for bad things.

Black Circle is now streaming on Shudder.

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