Welcome to the Circle

One of the most aggressively bizarre films in recent memory, Welcome to the Circle is a genuinely nightmarish, creepy, trippy, almost Lynchian Canadian "horror" film about a sinister mind control cult and the survivors who are trying to escape its clutches. A camping misadventure forces a young girl and her father into the realm of a demon-worshiping cult known as The Circle, a New Age-ish commune living in cabins in the woods and headed by an L. Ron Hubbard-like zealot. As the pair become trapped in The Circle’s increasingly frightening sphere of indoctrination, a case-hardened professional cult deprogrammer and his two clients attempt to kidnap/reclaim one of group’s members. Grizzly rituals are soon revealed to be part of a terrifying, surreal, alternate reality that has been constructed by the cult’s mysterious, isolated leader. Escape is the only objective, but all of them are trapped in The Circle.