A relic from the 1970s—a self-help RECORDS intended to teach the audience to “reach your full potential”—evoking the terrifying turmoil of the two sisters in Black Circleis a 2018 horror film worth seeking out now that it is streaming on Tremble.

Made in Sweden by Spanish writer-director Adrian Garcia Bogliano (2022’s The Exorcist), Black Circle plunges you into woo-woo by opening a film clip purportedly taken from a correspondence course sold by the “Stockholm Institute for Magnetic Research.” The technique it pushes is a form of hypnotism taken to the extreme, and its claims are extraordinary. Who doesn’t want to become the best version of themselves simply by clearing away all the negative energy and intrusive thoughts they’ve been holding on to since childhood?

It’s a tempting proposition for Celeste (Felice Jankell), a twenty-something whose life now revolves around 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 (Erica Midfjäll)—whom she hasn’t seen in a long time—invites her to stop by her office, Celeste is impressed by Isa’s hard work and enthusiastic nature. Things are going well, Isa tells her, and she wants to help Celeste change her own life.

Although Celeste brushes off her pushy sister a bit, it’s replaced by confusion when Isa hands her a record and tells her to “play the B-side while you sleep.” The effects will be life-changing, he promises, and they all come from this strange LP he found in the trash left by “grandma’s cousin Lundstrom,” who until her death was the only other living relatives of the orphaned siblings. Celeste is skeptical of what feels like a cult coming, but she gives it a spin. The next morning, he sat up straight, ran to his laptop, and triumphantly pulled out page after page of his paper.

Naturally, there is a catch to this miraculous good fortune, and such Black Circle Constructed to show exactly what the shot looks like, the film divides itself into short chapters, not unlike a correspondence course. It also jumps back into the film-within-a-film to layer in some exposition about “magnetic hypnosis,” given in optimistic terms that don’t match the increasingly uncomfortable results we see. of the sisters. The technique guides a person to offload the mental baggage that is holding them back—but once removed, the baggage is said to take the form of an “Ethereal Double,” a kind of doppelganger that gradually draws more and more energy from its original source.

That was disturbing enough even then Black Circle introduces another layer of mythology, involving beings who intervene when an Ethereal Double becomes too comfortable in the human realm. That’s one aspect of the story that doesn’t get enough shaping, though Black Circle on the other hand is heavily invested in subverting it with New Age psychology. As their lives are suffocated by paranoid delusions that might be real, Isa and Celeste track down the woman who released the record, a psychic who suffered her own tragedy when learning the devastating effects of magnetic hypnosis—and who grudgingly stepped in to help. its latest victim.

Although the “reverse exorcism” ritual that replaces the film’s third act drags a bit, Black Circle has a unique energy and self-confident, often psychedelic visual style that allows it to carve a unique space in the realm of cursed-media films. But unlike characters in, for example, The Ring—watching a haunted video tape for fun, not knowing it will seal their doom— Black CircleThe sisters deliberately, albeit naively, open themselves up to LP’s mind-boggling capabilities. The resulting journey brings a lot of horror, but it is also illustrative Black CircleThe deepest theme: you must do the work necessary to get rid of the negativity that has accumulated in your life, instead of hoping to get better just by wishing for bad things.

Black Circle now streaming on Shudder.

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