The Circle

A richly absorbing historical docudrama.

The Circle has a sincerity and an honesty that shames far more expensive but over-polished dramas. Plenty of movies have happy endings; The Circle shows you both the happy ending and the incredibly hard work it took to get there.

The film refuses to tease us with suspense, overwhelm us with sentimentality, or defy us with nuance.

Its fascinations compromised by its clunkiness, the film is a necessary niche history that serves well enough as a primer, placing it just a cut above coasting on good intentions.

The Circle is an undiscovered gem that constantly delights with its unshowy transference of an inherited blood debt that we finally are 'beginning' to honour.

The sense of an invisible world being revealed is more potent than the film’s fairly standard portrayal of closeted life.

This is a fascinating and often tumultuous story, which Haupt chronicles through a mixture of interviews with the real Ostertag and Rapp (now married, they appear as a pair) alongside dramatized vignettes that, as the film wears on, feel like annoying interruptions.