Fifty Angry Men [Review: Circle]

Fifty people awake to find they are standing on glowing red spots in a circle in a dark room. They quickly learn that they are playing a deadly game – every few minutes one person is killed instantly by a shock from the hemisphere in the centre, their body then dragged out into the darkness by unseen forces. If they step off their circles they also die. It takes them a few rounds, and a few deaths, to understand that while they cannot prevent the scheduled rounds, they can choose who dies in each round.

Circle is a literal, minimalist version of the balloon debate – if the balloon is losing altitude and you can’t all survive, who gets chucked out of the balloon and how do you persuade others to do the chucking. The starting fifty are diverse enough to (loosely) represent all of humanity. As the players learn how to vote for each other, alliances and dividing lines appear around age, race, gender, sexuality, politics and profession. Players try to use this to their advantage, but if they seem too manipulative then other players may turn on them next.

This is a low-budget, one-room, concept movie – The Hunger Games meets Exam meets Cube (links are to my reviews of these films) with a dash of Lord of the Flies and a twist of Twelve Angry Men. While the scenario is contrived, even compared to other one-room movies, the writers and directors, Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione, have hit on a simple but effective concept which builds tension over and over again, and the script stands up well covering a lot of ground.

The main expense for this film was probably the cast of fifty actors - all unknown but certainly up to the job, so the conflict is believable. There's a lot of death, it's sudden and brutal although not too bloody, and while some deaths are shown directly many are communicated through reaction shots. The ending isn't easily predictable, and left me with a lot to think about. The film could be a metaphor for political extremism, media bias or the rise of prejudice in general, and of course it's even more relevant in the age of Reality TV.

Two important questions are left unanswered: when does the board game version come out, and how many batteries will it require?

To disambiguate, this is low-budget movie Circle (2015) – not the movie of Dave Eggers’ internet parody novel The Circle (2017).

Questions, Questions, We All Got Questions [Review: Exam]

“There is one question before you, and one answer is required. If you try to communicate with myself or the guard, you will be disqualified. If you spoil your paper, intentionally or accidentally, you will be disqualified. If you choose to leave this room for any reason, you will be disqualified. Any questions?”

Eight young men and women are escorted into an examination room by an armed guard. They are smartly dressed but some have mysterious cuts or bruises. They are candidates for a highly prized job and the exam is the final stage of the selection procedure. The invigilator stresses that the unknown employer is so powerful that within these walls they can make their own rules. However the penalty for breaking a rule is not execution but simply a bus ride home – and failure.

Stuart Hazeldine’s film Exam is set in a cleverly designed concrete bunker which is reminiscent of Cube, as is the ethnically-diverse group of characters with complementary skills and the philosophical undertone to the dialogue. Exam does not rely on Cube’s cheesewire-trap shocks, although the setting is never “safe” and the danger escalates as the LED clock ticks down. The one-room concept is strictly adhered to – apart from the opening sequence in a washroom, the camera is entirely limited to the exam chamber itself and about two metres of coridoor outside the obligatory sliding door: this works in the film’s favour – a location that initially appears bleak turns out to have secrets and surprises behind every feature.

Exam is based on your own personal examination nightmare, and predictably the candidates turn their papers over to find that they are blank*: happily this is just the opening gambit in a series of puzzles, twists, red herrings and trust-betrayal dilemmas. The key is in the rules, or rather what the rules do not say. For instance there’s no rule against communication between the candidates, so they can cooperate to work out the nature of the question – but the same rules also leave open some interesting ways of disadvantaging each other. The cast of Exam try to resolve their situation within these rules rather than escape them so Exam is not science fiction.

Adar Beck as "Brunette" in Exam

Cinematically this is a tense and extremely watchable film. Exam is tightly scripted and does a very good job of gradually hinting at each candidate’s background as well as the nature of the mysterious employer and the state of the world outside. Colin Salmon is perfectly cast as the suave invigilator and Adar Beck is particularly good as a psychologist who turns out to have previously worked for the company – the others turn on her as they suspect that the exam is some kind of experiment. The ending is clean, resolving the mystery firmly and fairly: it’s well done but sometimes, as in Cube or, say, Blade Runner, it’s good to leave a little ambiguity.

*For those readers whose exam nightmare involves finding that instead of a paper on your desk there is a slice of black forest gateau, my condolences – but watch out for the sequel.

Location, Location, Location

Indie filmmakers are often advised to limit films to the minimum number of sets, and I can personally vouch for this: moving from place to place and setting up over and over again in new locations wears everyone out and eats up valuable slate time.

Some films make a virtue out of this minimalist approach: Exam (review to follow) and the Cube series are all based around ingeniously designed one-room sets, while Buried goes even further and sets all the action in a coffin. Other variations include 127 Hours featuring a protagonist trapped on a mountain, while the two swimmers in Open Water spend the entire movie treading water and avoiding sharks.

This inventiveness also extends to other minimalist films like Phone Booth which is based around one location although the action does cut away sometimes, or The Hole (2001, starring Thora Birch, not the many other films with the same name) with a single location for about two-thirds of the film.

This is not a new phenomenon and there are some classic one-room films: Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men is superb and influential (leading into, for example, several of Tony Hancock’s television plays.) Several people also recommended Hitchcock’s Rear Window to me, a classic film I have yet to see.

There are also plenty of films that are limited to a single building or suite of rooms such as 1408 or Paranormal Activity. Films set inside aeroplanes also have a similar feel – Flightplan, Snakes On A Plane, Airplane! A group of people trapped in a house is a trope of the whodunnit genre, from Agatha Christie’s novels and their adaptations to another classic Sleuth: as with Cube, Exam and Paranormal Activity, the limitations are part of the puzzle which has to be solved if we are to escape.

One-location films subvert the potential scope of cinema – the freedom of the camera, and therefore the narrative, to go anywhere. It’s closer to theatre where, with exceptions, a small number of locations is the rule. These films also create an intense experience by playing on common fears of confinement. There may be a metaphorical explanation for many of these locations: life itself, or the Earth, is limited in all sorts of ways, and ultimately there is only one escape from it although we may dream of others.

With thanks to all the blogcatalog members who helped me research this article.