{Blu-ray Review} Improving Life Through Magnetism: Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s Black Circle (2018)

“Body and soul are at conflict with the duality of the self.”

I never saw Here Comes the Devil and wasn’t a big fan of Late Phases, so it wasn’t exactly writer/director Adrian Garcia Bogliano’s name that convinced me to give Black Circle a try, when the opportunity came along to review the new Blu-ray from Synapse. If I’m being entirely honest, it was probably just the Blu-ray’s cover art that hooked me, though its logline about a sinister self-help record from the ‘70s didn’t hurt.

Here’s the thing, though: Had I known that the record in question was going to concern itself so heavily with the theories and history of hypnotism/mesmerism/magnetism, I would have been on board twice as fast. That’s a subject I always find ripe for good horror exploration, and one that often works on even a modest budget, so long as the filmmaker has a vision.

And I’m happy to say that I think Bogliano has found a subject that matches his particular style well. Black Circle may be at its best when it’s just droning industrial films, old photographs, and sonorous voices issuing verbal commands, but it’s pretty damn great when it’s those things, and no slouch the rest of the time, either.

The film is broken into several chapters, each of which is bookended with these sorts of industrial film sequences, all concerning the movie’s version of hypnosis/mesmerism/magnetism – it gets into the specifics of the differences, but we don’t need to. These segments give the film’s mythos a lived-in quality, while also providing exposition for some of its weirder ideas.

That said, the basics are pretty simple. Two sisters find themselves haunted by a sinister force after listening to the self-help record, which they got as an inheritance from a distant and largely unknown relative. This sinister force eventually becomes a shadowy double that follows them around until it grows strong enough to replace them.

For most indie horror films, that would be plenty, but this one adds a lot more wrinkles to the plot, including psychic powers and a whole mythology involving the inhuman residents of the “psychic plane.” Besides the style of the thing itself, these added complications are what kept me riveted throughout the movie, even if they ultimately don’t pay off into anything more than the resolution we were always going to get.

A couple of times now I’ve mentioned the style of the film, and that’s really where Black Circle lives and breathes. From those industrial film interludes to its unusual soundscape, it is a movie about mesmerism that is, itself, mesmerizing for those who are suitably suggestible, but it won’t be to everyone’s taste. The montage effects, sonorous voiceovers, and overly-complicated mythology may be appropriate to the subject matter, but there will certainly be viewers who find it alienating or pretentious, as witnessed by the many lackluster reviews on Letterbboxd.

Ultimately, though, this is no Peter Strickland film, and the narrative is relatively easy to follow, for all its odd turns and cul-de-sacs, bringing to bear just enough unique elements to help it stand out from a crowd of quiet, personal horror movies about trauma and identity, sisterhood and regret and all that jazz.

There are also a lot of other elements to unpack when talking about Black Circle, though. Things that are, at best, adjacent to the film itself. For starters, we need to dig back into that soundscape for a minute. The score by Rickard Gramfors was obviously important enough that the soundtrack is included as an audio CD with the Synapse Blu-ray. As behooves a movie about listening to a record, sound is every bit as integral to the atmosphere and personality of Black Circle as anything that you see on screen, whether that’s the score itself, the repeated vocal motifs, or the simple sounds of a record playing “silence” or two canes thumping on a hard floor.

Besides scoring Black Circle, Gramfors is the director of the 2022 documentary about the making of the 1973 film Thriller: A Cruel Picture, a Swedish rape-revenge flick also known as They Call Her One Eye and Hooker’s Revenge. That movie is one of several softcore and exploitation films made by a young Christina Lindberg. And Gramfors isn’t the only connection between Thriller and Black Circle. A now much older Lindberg plays a major role in Black Circle, dominating the screen as the surviving magnetizer who initially made the record that started all this mess and must now help the sisters try to clean it up.

Using someone like Lindberg in a role like this could easily be stunt casting that added little to the film for anyone who wasn’t a fan of Swedish exploitation cinema from the ‘70s, but once she is introduced midway through, she rapidly becomes the absolute backbone of the whole affair.

There are other fobs to the history of Swedish genre cinema in this joint Mexican/Swedish flick, as well. Our lead character’s room is decorated with posters from monster movies including the 1959 Swedish “classic” Invasion of the Animal People, while none other than Pippi Longstocking herself, Inger Nilsson, has a small role as a secretary.