Small touches save the day.
Looked at in Grand Scope, Circle of Eight is a Twilight Zone episode stretched into a full movie.
Jessica has just moved into the Dante on New Year’s Eve. The Dante an apartment complex populated by artists and bohemians, all of whom exhibit behavior starting with quirky and elevating to abnormal. She barely has time to learn her neibhors’ names before they begin dying violently.
With Midnight drawing ever closer, her sanity begins to slip farther away. Tensions build and reality shatters and her. Will she be able to survive the new year?
What helps to flesh the story into a full feature film are the small touches. One subtle moment can connect multiple important plot lines. Overt clues turn out to be false leads. The big reveal is a simple relay of facts that leave the audience to terrify themselves with the implications. As such, Circle of Eight easily features one of my favorite surprise endings this side of Sleepaway Camp.
All of the movie’s great moments unfortunately give way to the sensation of deja-vu. Even though the filmmakers deftly avoided many tropes and played off of others, the familiarity of these cliches can still come off as bland by association. Some viewers might identify with the building of passionate twenty-something artists. Others, who perhaps studied Information Technology during those years and whose drink of choice was Jolt Cola, may not be able to connect quite as well.
Circle of Eight demands some patience to watch. Despite this, you never really feel the unwarranted pretension that other “thinking” horror movies beat their audience over the head with.
The characters are individually interesting, the story is just full of itself enough to work without turning sour, and there really are a few clever ideas in it.
Circle of Eight is absolutely worth at least a rental.
