Full Circle (1977)

               After this month is done, I am going to do several web searches, carefully note the names of everyone credited to one of those ‘The 10 Best Ghost Movies’ clickbait articles, and write them each a sternly worded letter of complaint. 1976’s ‘Burnt Offerings’ is not a ghost movie. It doesn’t even pretend to be a ghost movie. I’ve been stung enough times that by this point I’m skimming plot synopses of the movies on my list before I start watching. Which is not ideal because of the occasional spoiler, but at least I’m starting to learn which films don’t actually have any ghosts in them before I’m half an hour in. I was going to watch it anyways, the premise sounds wackadoo and I wanted to see a Karen Black movie better than 1991’s ‘Children of the Night,’ but then I read a little about Oliver Reed’s life and got sad and decided not to.

              It did make me go with a movie that originally didn’t make the list, which is good because I really liked ‘Full Circle.’ Released in the US as ‘The Haunting of Julia,’ this movie stars Mia Farrow and not much else. Which sounds like a criticism but it’s not, frankly Farrow is so good in this that she’s enough. The film is also so British it hurts. This makes it four English ghost movies in a row. Luckily next is John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog,’ which will wash all the limey right out of my mouth. The producers couldn’t quite scrape the funds together in the UK so raised a bunch from a Canadian Radio conglomerate, as you do, and cobbled together the rest. Per producer Peter Fetterman: “I managed to persuade a group of musicians, their management, and accountants to put up 400,000 dollars between them. So now I had 500,000 from Canada, 400,000 dollars from England, and I could raise 10,000 dollars in small units from private investors.” Throw in a reference to dentists and could’ve been a Sam Raimi quote.

              The film is an adaption of Peter Straub’s novel Julia. I have not read that book, but I’ve read a couple of others by him and based on those I’m guessing that a lot of nuance and backstory was cut for the movie. Which makes sense, that’s what you need to do in an adaptation, especially one that’s as visually focused as this one. There are entire scenes of the movie just made up of static shots of Farrow not doing much, and in context they’re great but you only have so many minutes in the film and that’s time you can’t use for characterization or plot. The director was Richard Loncraine, who up to this point had only worked in tv. He’d go on to to a bunch of interesting movies, including ‘Brimstone and Treacle’ and the 1995 ‘Richard III.’ The first pass of the adaptation was by Harry Bromley Davenport, the eventual director of the ‘Xtro’ films. The credited screenwriter was Dave Humphries, probably best known for writing the screenplay to ‘Quadrophenia.’

              The movie itself, however, was assembled by the producers, principally the previously mentioned Peter Fetterman. After cobbling together the funds he flew out to L.A. to find a big name star to attach to the project but couldn’t find any takers. Then he learned that Mia Farrow was already in London performing on stage. He convinced her to star despite her reluctance to appear in another horror movie after ‘Rosemary’s Baby.’ She shot her scenes in between performing with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Since it was produced independently it toured film festivals looking for a buyer, and this version was around six minutes longer than the eventual theatrical cut. The audience response made them tighten the structure up a bit. Most of the deleted scenes are unimportant but a couple aren’t, as we’ll address later.

              The cast is relatively small and everyone else in it ranges from good to fine. There’s Farrow herself as Julia Lofting. Keir Dullea, of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ is her husband Magnus. Jill Bennett plays Magnus’ sister Lily. Julia’s friend Mark Berkeley is played by Tom Conti, who has a staggering number of credits. He was Emily’s dad on “Friends” and played Einstein in ‘Oppenheimer,’ to grab a couple at random. He’s the only one who can keep up with Farrow in this movie. Special notice should also be paid to Anna Wing as the psychic Rosa Flood. She’s one of those British character actors who pop in everything they’re in.

              I felt the need to stress earlier that I liked this movie because that is not a universal opinion. The reviews at the time of release ranged from general indifference, with some nods to Farrow’s performance as better than the movie deserved, to downright hostility. Which I can understand, this is not an energetic movie. Everything is generally slow and contemplative. The camera doesn’t move a lot, edits are generally unobtrusive, and the acting is very naturalistic. The soundtrack’s great but an odd fit for the movie, which is explained a little bit by the fact that it was composed from the screenplay before anything was shot. It was written by Colin Town and sounds a whole lot like what a keyboardist in the Ian Gillian Band would write (progressive jazz, that most 70’s of musical genres). It’s really good, and some of the home releases have also contained a cd of the soundtrack. The music doesn’t always match what’s on screen, but it’s a good enough film that it uses that contrast as a source of tension. All of this adds up a movie that, if you’re looking for visceral scares from your scary movie, could really disappoint you.

              I’ll make an uncharacteristic aside here: as I said I really liked this movie and genuinely recommend it to anyone who finds anything I’ve said so far even mildly interesting. From this point on I’m going to do my usual thing and start casually tossing spoilers around. This is a film that I think is well-written enough as a mystery that it works better going in not knowing the ending. It doesn’t ruin anything if you do but I think it’d make for a better watch if you don’t.

              Like almost all ghost stories, this is a movie about grief and the destructive ways people deal with it. Luckily for me this movie does that and also has ghosts in it. It opens with Farrow’s Julia accidentally killing her daughter Kate. This start was rough for me to watch for a couple of reasons: firstly it’s a pretty realistic depiction of a child choking to death despite her mother’s efforts, with an emergency tracheotomy that goes so badly wrong it turns the mom into a killer. The camera turning from the newly arrived ambulance crew to Farrow with blood on her clothes, twitching and shaking and obviously completely disassociated, is not a fun moment. Secondly a big chunk of that scene is played with the father literally holding the child upside down and shaking her, which turns the entire thing absurd and funny, and then Farrow suddenly has a knife in her hand and it’s not funny anymore.

              I briefly want to break down the scene leading up to the moment, because I think it’s illustrative of how decent filmmakers think things through. Most of the scene is a lockdown shot of the kitchen table as the three family members talk and lightly bicker. Mom on camera left, Dad camera right, daughter center. Kate’s father, Magnus, is reading something and clearly not paying attention. Julia is doting on her daughter while also being the one to set the rules, as Kate asks to have an apple before breakfaster and Julia tells her no. As Kate starts her breakfast her mother warns her about eating too fast. Magnus mentions some paperwork for Julia’s trust fund, which is useful information for later. As the two adults bicker about nothing the camera slowly zooms in on Kate as she takes a big bite of the apple. The camera holds on her face as she quietly starts to choke and it doesn’t cut away until her parents start to notice. In just two minutes we get the family dynamics that will define the character actions over the course of the movie (Magnus is checked out, Julia was mostly focused on Kate), character backstories (Magnus cares about business and Julia’s trust fund), the family was at least partially dysfunctional (the camera focuses on Kate while her parents drift offscreen), this is all good stuff and subtle enough that later on you’ll know information without quite realizing how the movie taught it to you.

It really does work in context.

              The film jumps forward something like a couple of months to the day that Julia is going to be discharged from psychiatric care. I’m sure the movie tells us how long it’s been but the specifics aren’t important. On the day of the release Magnus comes to check her out (wonderful scene of Magnus and Julia’s male doctor burbling away to themselves about her future and the decisions to be made while she slowly walks towards the camera), but instead she darts away and leaves by herself in a taxi. One scene transition later and she’s being shown the massive new house she’s just started renting. It’s never stated in the movie, but I think I put together from dialogue that a lot of the reason Magnus and his sister are so insistent on the marriage working out is that she’s the one with the money.

              Because if the house is anything to go by Julia is loaded. It’s at least two stories (the geography of the house is vaguely established and mostly unimportant) in something like central London and comes fully furnished. The vaguely racist estate agent even mentions to her that a lot of the surrounding properties are being bought up by ambassadorial staff and Arab businessmen. It also explains how she can jet around from place to place or spend long languid days home alone building towers out of playing cards or idly picking at a rug. These are those boring scenes I mentioned above, quick little scenelettes of one or two minutes that don’t do much but clue us in on where Julia’s head is at and reinforce the pacing and tone of the movie. They’re pointless and they’re also necessary.

              There is one actual complaint (and one nitpick) I have with the movie, and that’s how Julia gets drawn into her eventual obsession with the ghost in her house. On paper it makes sense, I can see how the movie gets there, but it’s very weak. She hears some odd noises at night that she thinks are her estranged husband trying to scare her but maybe not? A couple of times when she’s walking around London she sees a little girl from behind that kind of looks like her daughter, and then after she looks away she’s gone. The radiator in her bedroom keeps turning on after she’s sure she turned it off. In a ploy that I still don’t understand Magnus’ sister invites herself and some friends over to Julia’s house to hold a séance. The psychic gets scared and tells Julia to leave, and one of the other participants falls down some stairs.    

              That’s it, by the way. That’s all that happens before Julia becomes convinced there’s a ghost in her house, it may even be Kate. Magnus has been claiming ever since she left him that Julia is mentally unwell as a clear ruse to regain control over her money, but if that’s all it takes for her to start believing in ghosts maybe he’s got a point. The movie tries to distract us from that thought by having Magnus break into Julia’s house while she’s driving everyone home from the séance. He hears some noises that make him think Julia’s hiding in the basement, walks down some stairs while berating her, then trips and falls off the stairs onto a mirror, apparently dying. For the entire rest of the movie he’s just down there, rotting, as his name never comes up again and Julia never goes down into the basement after that. This is where some of those six minutes of cuts come in, because originally Magnus gets fed up at chasing noises and angrily leaves. I’m pretty sure they assembled his death from reshoots and b-roll. This also plays into a question I have about ghost motivations later.

              The rest of the movie is Julia visiting a bunch of different people and piecing the ghost’s backstory together. Julie asks a neighbor about the previous owners, and it turns out one of them had a little girl named Olivia that also choked to death. I was originally mad at such a blatant coincidence, but it ends up more being interesting than that. This makes Julia go bother the psychic lady. She finally badgers her into admitting she did see a vision of a dead little kid at Julia’s house, but it was a boy. Mark tells Julia he thinks she’s starting to obsess over all this, so she ditches his ass and goes to the library to look through about a half-decade’s worth of newspapers. Eventually she finds the story of a little German kid killed in the park by her new house. So she bothers the kid’s elderly mom, who claims the other kids murdered him for being German, it being the 40’s and all. She names names, and Julia tracks down two of the now-grown kids. One tells her to get lost, the other gets drunk and admits to taking part in killing the kid and that he and the other children did it because Olivia told them to. She was the one who actually did the deed herself, choking the kid to death on dirt and grass. This makes Julia go see Olivia’s very elderly mom in a care home, who snaps out of her dementia long enough to happily greet Julia as another mother who’s killed her child. She proclaims with relish that she strangled Olivia after one of the boys she’d been sexually experimenting with tattled on her. Turns out she’d lied about the girl choking to death.

              Scattered throughout all of this are scenes of almost everyone Julia interacted with over the course of the movie dying through ghostly intervention. After Magnus the next to die is the guy who admitted to taking part in the murder. He slips on a bottle and falls off a set of stairs. Ghost isn’t very original. The next is Mark, who has a lamp fall on him in the bath. The wiring in British buildings at the time was bad enough that I’ll buy that. Next is Olivia’s mother, who glimpses her daughter in Julia’s eyes and suffers a major heart attack.

              When Julia gets home from this last conversation she refreshes herself in the upstairs bathroom. She sees Olivia’s  reflection in a mirror and then hears noises from downstairs. She heads down and when she gets there she sees Olivia, clearly visible, sitting in the middle of the living room floor. She’s playing with a little wind-up clown with a pair of cymbals that used to be Kate’s favorite toy. Julia carefully sits down in a chair close to her and takes the doll away, warning the ghost that the edges of the cymbals are sharp. She reaches out to Olivia, offering a hug, asking her to stay with her in the house. Farrow is shown reaching out to the approaching camera. The shot then cuts to a side-view of Farrow in the chair, background a completely black void, camera slowly circling. With a calm expression Farrow settles back and says, “It’s all settled. Everything’s right now.” As the camera continues to circle around it reaches the back of the chair and the screen becomes completely black. “Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay -” and there’s a clang of cymbals. The camera swings out of the darkness to come around the other side of the chair and reveals Julia with her face slumped towards the camera, blood pumping down her chest from the two slashes on the side of her throat. The image holds on her still form in the chair as the credits roll.

              Here’s where the nitpick comes in. It’s not about this somewhat ambiguous ending, my reading is that Olivia used her connection with Julia, however it formed, to tag along as it were as she met with people she had grudges against and took the opportunity to get some revenge. There’s nothing in the movie to support that but nothing contradicts it, which I’ll take. Even though in the original cut he survived, justifying Magnus’ death is easy, he was inside the house and a threat to Julia, he had to go. Same for the grown-up murder kid and Olivia’s mom, those are straight revenge killings. I can even kind of justify Mark’s death because Olivia wanted Julia all for herself and was getting rid of anyone too close to her. At the end those words spoken by Julia are actually Olivia’s, stating that she’d finally had her revenge, she was happy now, and would quite like Julia to stick around. She either took over Julia’s body or, more likely, had her in some kind of trance where she didn’t know what she was doing when she slit her own throat. All of that is fine. My nitpick is the first name on the list she got from the dead German boy’s mom, the other grown-up murder kid who blew Julia off. Why didn’t Olivia kill him? It’s never established that he wasn’t guilty, he didn’t admit it to murder but he acted super shifty when she brought it up. Why even have that scene if the ghost seeking revenge doesn’t seek revenge against him? I’d blame it on a deleted scene but none of the write-ups of those trimmed six minutes ever mentioned anything as elaborate as another death.

              With the exception of those two things, which weren’t problems so much as they were distractions, I thought this movie did just about everything right. As I said I haven’t read the book but I’m going to go ahead and attribute the smart writing and fairly horrible twists to the original book by Peter Straub. I mentioned before that a previous owner of the house had a daughter who died the same way as Julia’s, and I was annoyed and then I wasn’t? That’s because in the end that little girl was Olivia who died because her mother strangled her to death and then lied that she choked instead. Then the extra twist that the murder was because the mother found out that her pre-pubescent daughter was sexually experimenting with the boys of the neighborhood and not because of the murder she’d committed. That’s a writer who was close pals with Stephen King all right. Normally I complain about backstory dumps in these movies because it’s always done so lazily, but here the twists and turns of the backstory and how they’re uncovered actually have repercussions on the present of the story, and those twists and turns are genuinely shocking. Farrow’s great and the film looks amazing. It’s gained a much better reputation over time and is considered something of a classic now. I don’t think it’s streaming anywhere, but there are copies floating around everywhere and there are a ton of new 4K editions. Favorite one this month so far. Take that, William Castle!