Circle in the Sand: Hudson Blurs the Borders of the Mind
“Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill,” wrote English writer Richard Aldington in his 1931 novel The Colonel’s Daughter. Such is the nature of the increasingly absurd scenario in Oscar Hudson’s directorial debut, Straight Circle, the title itself a contradiction regarding the futility of progress defined by political ideations. The narrative is relatively simple, hyper focused on enemy soldiers forced to occupy and guard a remote border between two previously warring nations, wasting away in a desert outpost as they slowly lose their faculties…and their convictions. The mindfulness adage credited to Jon Kabat-Zinn, “wherever you go, there you are” comes to mind as the identity of the two men eventually becomes indistinguishable, for as privileges and comforts erode, we’re forced to confront how our commonalities outweigh our differences.
The film’s opening sequence represents Hudson’s most lavish set piece with a chaotic ceremony meant to honor the “shared stewardship” of a newly anointed border station. If these two countries have been at peace, it hasn’t been for long, with mutterings of what sound like racial euphemisms for those living in the ‘lowlands’ peppering the atmosphere. Afterwards, all is quiet on the desert front as two men (Elliott and Luke Tittensor), one bald and one hirsute, exchange barbs as they occupy the same facility, endlessly watching for transgressions on either side of an ersatz border. But the desert stretches on in an endless oasis. Bickering over specific customs (such as a four hour egg boiling process one insists removes the risk of a local contagion), their daily duties consist of releasing a symbolic dove into the air —though there are no witnesses to appreciate their devotion to the task. When communication appears to be cut off from their prospective sides, and with food resources dwindling, the men descend into an identity crisis, eventually forgetting who is who and where they’re from.
A handful of films have dealt with similar cultural and masculine crises in the same format, often circling the specter of war amidst colonization, perhaps none more effectively than Joseph Conrad’s An Outpost of Progress (adapted in 1982 by Dorian Walker, and again in 2016 by Hugo Vieira da Silva) or J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarian, adapted by Ciro Guerra in 2019. But external forces are hardly existential in those texts, and Hudson’s Kafkaesque comedy feels mostly like the morbid version of Dino Buzzati’s classic novel The Tartar Steppe (adapted by Jessica Woodworth as Luka in 2023), wherein endless waiting at a desolate outpost for a danger never transpiring leads to stifled lives.
It’s eventually revealed the men are doppelgängers, the casting of twin brothers Elliott and Luke Tittensor effectively obscured until both end up as clean shaven reflections. Neil Maskell pops up as a doomed goatherd, who doesn’t speak the same language as the two border guards, and is captured when he can’t produce the proper documentation for his travels. The interlude seemingly produces a curse which instigates a hastened trip to shared madness, each man taking turns as dominatrix and subordinate (which results in the unfortunate fate for some of their avian wards), eventually having to put post it notes on their foreheads to differentiate between themselves.
On paper, Straight Circle sounds like it’s approaching Persona (1966) or even The Lighthouse (2019) territory, but a droll tone, enhanced by DP Christopher Ripley’s (Skincare, 2024) split screen semantics, channels something much less serious, like Evan Twohy’s Bubble & Squeak (2025). As could be predicted, the film builds to an expected, and ultimate irony. But much like the title suggests, it feels as if we get right back to where we started from.
Reviewed on September 2nd at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – International Critics’ Week. 108 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆