@ Odeon, Edinburgh, Sat 20 Jun & Cineworld, Edinburgh, Tue 23 Jun 2015
Levan Akin / Sweden / 2015 / 144 min
Based on the first book in Mats Strandberg and Sara Bergmark Elfgren‘s best-selling Engelsfors trilogy, The Circle (Cirkeln) is your everyday story of small town teenage witches going about the never-ending business of saving the world from evil daemons.
Produced by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and his son Ludvig, it travels a very well worn path. A posse of teenagers (the “chosen ones”) discover they have emerging magical powers and, using these, are expected to rid the world of an unknown malevolent force. Each has her own elemental sign and (thus) her own special powers. Along the way, they need to determine who they can and cannot trust and maybe uncover a few home truths about themselves.
The teenagers are stock characters taken from the genre, like a coven of Spice Girls, comprising the goth, the nerd, the bitch, the sex bomb, the outsider, and the one-with-problems. None of these characters are developed much beyond their standard issue clothing and hairdos, and the thin script gives the actors very little to sink their teeth into. They trudge on from one predictable scene to the next, taking us slowly toward what turns out to be a very disappointing climax, despite a reasonable effort from the special effects team.
This needs to be more tightly structured, have more punch and ideally needs to play with the genre more. The setting-up of the initial premise is slow and clunky, the cinematography is a mélange of disparate styles and sadly the Benny Anderson score does not deliver (a cheeky quotation from the X-Files theme tune is fun to discover, however).
Although this may contain some morsels for both Engelsfors fans and extreme Swedophiles, and has just about enough going on to sustain interest in an emergency (a long haul flight, for example), for connoisseurs of the genre there is simply not much here. Despite this, the film is left very open-ended, with a number of questions left unanswered, paving the way for the inevitable adaptations of the final two books in the series (Fire and The Key). If these are ever put in production — and if the first film survives at the box office, they are expected to be — it can only be hoped that they learn from The Circle‘s deficiencies.
Showing as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015