Black Circle saturates the Cursed Media genre with psychic terrors

A relic from the 70s – self-help record aiming to teach the listener to ‘unleash their full potential’ – wreaks frightening mayhem for two sisters in Black circlea 2018 horror film worth seeking out now that it is streaming on I’m shivering.

Made in Sweden by Spanish writer and director Adrian García Boliano (2022 The Exorcist), Black circle plunges you straight into the woo-woo by opening a film clip purportedly taken from a correspondence course offered by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research”. The technique she pushes is a kind of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and her claims are fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to become the best version of themselves by simply clearing away all the bad energy and obsessive thoughts they’ve been clinging to since childhood?

It’s a tempting proposition for Celeste (Felice Yankel), a twenty-something whose life is currently spinning in the existential gutter. She has 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-awaited school paper. So when her sister Isa (Erika Midfjall) – who she hasn’t seen in a while – invites her to stop by her office, Celeste is impressed by Issa’s hard work and upbeat attitude. Things are going really well, Isa tells her, and she wants to help Celeste turn her own life around.

Although Celeste bristles a little at her assertive sister, this is replaced by confusion when Issa hands her a record and tells her to “play the B-side while you fall asleep.” The effects are life-changing, she promises, and they all stem from this strange album she found among the junk left behind by “Grandma Lundström’s cousin,” who until his death was the only living relative of the orphaned sisters. Celeste is skeptical of what feels like cult involvement, but she turns it around. The next morning, she sits up straight, sprints to her laptop, and triumphantly flips through page after page of her newspaper.

Naturally, there is a catch to this miraculous luck and like Black circle to show exactly what this ruse looks like, the film is divided into short chapters, not unlike a correspondence course. It also goes back to the movie within the movie to layer in some exposition about “magnetic hypnosis,” presented in optimistic terms that don’t match the increasingly unsettling results we see with the sisters. The technique guides a person to unload the mental baggage that has been holding them back – but once it’s erased, said baggage takes the form of an “Ethereal Double”, a kind of doppelganger that gradually draws more and more energy from its original source.

This is troubling enough before Black circle introduces another layer of mythology involving beings who intervene if an Ethereal Doppelgänger gets too comfortable in the human realm. This is an aspect of the story that is not made clear enough, but Black circle otherwise deeply invested in its subversion of New Age psychology. As their lives are suffocated by paranoid delusions that just might be real, Issa and Celeste discover the woman who issued the tape, a psychic who has suffered her own tragedy learning the harmful effects of magnetic hypnosis – and who darkly swings into action to to help his latest victims.

Although the “reverse exorcism” ritual that takes up the film’s third act drags on 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 media-cursed movies. But unlike the characters in, for example, The ring-who watch a ghostly videotape for fun, unaware that it will seal their doom- Black circlethe sisters deliberately, if naively, open themselves up to LP’s mind-warping abilities. The resulting journey carries a lot of horror, but it also illustrates Black circlethe deepest theme of: you have to do the work necessary to overcome the negativity that has built up in your life, rather than hoping to heal by simply wishing the bad things away.

Black circle now streaming on Shudder.

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