Let’s imagine for a moment that Black Mirror was adapted by a committee of marketing interns, filtered through a TED Talk, given a coat of Silicon Valley paint, and then drowned in a vat of lukewarm moral ambiguity. That unholy stew of glossy technophobia and empty philosophical musing? That’s The Circle, a movie so proudly self-important it makes you want to cancel your internet, burn your phone, and then pour hand sanitizer in your eyes just to forget you ever watched it.
Directed by James Ponsoldt—who once showed promise with The Spectacular Now and promptly decided to throw all that potential into the abyss—The Circle is based on the novel by Dave Eggers, a man whose prose reads like someone trying to sell you a Prius while lecturing you about late capitalism. This film is a dystopian thriller in the same way a cardboard cutout is a security guard. It watches over nothing. It protects no one. And if it were lit on fire, no one would mourn.
Emma Watson plays Mae Holland, a character so devoid of personality she makes Siri look like Hedda Gabler. Mae starts out working a soul-crushing customer service job (relatable) and then lands a gig at The Circle, a Google-Facebook-Apple hybrid of tech cultism and synthetic joy, run by Tom Hanks in a Steve Jobs cosplay wig. Hanks, bless his cashmere charisma, tries to inject menace into a character who is basically a smug dad at a barbecue explaining cryptocurrency. He fails, but not for lack of effort. He just doesn’t have anything to work with besides PowerPoint slides and monologues that sound like they were copied from a Stanford commencement speech and then given a lobotomy.
Once Mae joins The Circle, she’s swept into a world of pastel-colored utopian fascism, where everyone smiles too much, drinks organic smoothies, and worships the idea that privacy is sin. Their corporate motto might as well be: “If you’re not livestreaming your every bowel movement, what are you hiding?”
The movie attempts to build tension around the Circle’s ever-expanding surveillance tech—stuff like SeeChange, a tiny camera that can be placed anywhere and stream everything to the internet. The pitch? Transparency will eliminate crime and make people behave better. Because nothing screams personal growth like being watched while you weep into a Lean Cuisine.
Mae, ever the eager lab rat, volunteers to go “fully transparent,” which means wearing a camera 24/7 and subjecting every intimate, awkward, and bowel-related moment of her life to millions of viewers. The movie wants this to feel like a descent into Orwellian horror. It feels more like The Truman Show if it were produced by Facebook Live and had the moral weight of a BuzzFeed poll.
John Boyega also shows up in this mess as Ty, the elusive founder of the Circle’s core technology who now lives in the shadows like a cyber-Holden Caulfield. His role is to drop exposition like a disgruntled IT guy who’s been waiting all movie to say, “You people have no idea what you’ve unleashed.” Then he promptly disappears into the background again, probably trying to hack into a better script.
And then there’s poor Ellar Coltrane, fresh off his 12-year Boyhood stint, playing Mae’s childhood friend Mercer. Mercer is a flannel-wearing deer antler carver—because of course he is—who represents the rustic heartland’s resistance to technology. He spends his screentime muttering things like “you’re changing” before being cyberbullied into oblivion and driven to an offscreen death. Spoiler alert: he dies. The movie tries to make it tragic. It’s about as affecting as losing a MySpace friend.
Ponsoldt directs this like he’s on sedatives. There’s no tension, no stakes, just long shots of Emma Watson staring at screens, asking questions no one cares about, and slowly turning into a digital Stepford wife. Every scene is lit like a tech company onboarding video, and the editing has all the urgency of a LinkedIn endorsement.
But what truly sinks The Circle—what truly seals its fate as a cinematic trainwreck—are the ideas. Or rather, the illusion of them. The movie throws around phrases like “community,” “accountability,” and “transparency” with the depth of a Twitter thread written during a juice cleanse. It gestures at ethics but refuses to commit. It nods at Orwell, but with the intellectual rigor of a high school book report. It wants to be a cautionary tale about surveillance culture, but it doesn’t even know what it’s warning us against. Bad branding? Too many likes? Dying alone in a world that knows your every click?
The film ends with a bizarre turn in which Mae flips the surveillance state on its head and outs the Circle’s founders as hypocrites by broadcasting their emails and private information live. It’s meant to be a triumphant moment of rebellion. It plays like a TED Talk that got hijacked by a teenager with a grudge and a TikTok account. No one learns anything. Nothing changes. The movie just ends in a pool of its own smugness, convinced it said something meaningful. It didn’t.
Even the score sounds like it gave up halfway through—a mix of limp techno blips and ambient dread that feels like it was composed by a Roomba. And as for the dialogue? Characters speak in hashtags. Every conversation feels like a press release. It’s like being trapped in an elevator with a startup founder who just discovered Noam Chomsky on Audible.
The Circle is not just a bad film. It’s an embarrassment of ideas, squandered talent, and overlit mediocrity. It’s what happens when Hollywood tries to be woke and deep but forgets to hire a writer who’s actually awake. It wants to make us question the modern digital age. All it really makes us question is why we didn’t spend the two hours watching literally anything else. A parking lot security feed would’ve had more drama.
Final verdict? The Circle is a surveillance-state satire that forgets how to satirize. It’s a thriller with no thrills, a drama with no pulse, and a morality tale with the depth of an Instagram story. Delete it from your queue. Unfriend it. Block it. Report it for spam. And then go live your life like no one’s watching—especially not James Ponsoldt.