The Circle
Poe’s Law strikes again. The ambiguous ending only makes the satire more biting. As an extra, there are some Abu Dhabi logos at the start, making it a textbook case of The Man sticking it to The Man. Plus a dig at China! A triple whammy!
The plot starts as the common rom com, following our doormat protagonist and her disadvantaged parents. Through a friend, she gets a job at Generic FAANG corporation.
From this, it quickly swings into a Silicon Valley-esque comedy, just before introducing the Black Mirror stuff.
This being America, her job is what leads to her father’s illness being mitigated, but it requires her to sleep under her desk, a tradeoff she gladly makes. She meets the founder of the main product, a social loner who turns out to be the guy who freed the genie out of his bottle.
The protagonist is really thick, it takes until her high school sweetheart is murdered by mobs of smartphone-wielding people until she finally finds the C-Suite abhorrent and plots their demise. Said demise is left to the imagination, after she exposes their hypocrisy and leaves through a door into a light. Fade to black, the end.
Most of the scenes require stepford smiles, sudden bursts of crying from nowhere, or forced laughter, it’s not a large range. The protagonist is a valley girl with an English accent, and her Virgil reverts into his Scottish accent when angry.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.