‘Straight Circle’ Review: A Border Satire That Transcends Its Flaws Through Abstraction

Right from its title, Oscar Hudson’s droll debut “Straight Circle” evokes paradoxical oddities, which the writer-director layers atop his deadpan satire on nationalism and geographical boundaries. A tale of two enemy soldiers patrolling a militarized border from inside a common outpost, the movie’s fictitious premise gradually transforms, and eventually transcends the shortcomings of its broad political scope the more it leans into abstraction.

The film arrives with a bang, introducing the fragile ceasefire between its warring (though unnamed) desert nations via a smart split-screen prologue during its first five minutes. Amid pomp and circumstance, leaders on either side of a rickety fence stand on ceremony, inadvertently interrupting one another through microphone feedback, as the dueling images — each with their own jittery, handheld camera movements and unique color timing, one warm and one cool — swap places and subjects. This tongue-in-cheek flourish aestheticizes the point Hudson hammers home ad nauseam across 109 minutes, to vary degrees of success: these nations, despite their differing military garbs and traditions, may as well be one and the same.

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Although consistently amusing, “Straight Circle” is at its strongest when literalizing the blurred line between borders through this two-pronged visual approach, though it only takes this form for a few more minutes near the end. However, in the meantime, Hudson still plays alluring tricks, beginning with his casting. The story’s focus is, for the most part, a pair of soldiers with opposing allegiances, viewpoints, and ideologies. One of them, a bald, bespectacled man filled with jingoistic fervor, dons a large black beret and a white uniform, and enacts a showy, gestural salute that earns his countrymen the epithet of “slap heads.” The other, a raggedy, bearded civilian from his country’s military reserve, is less enthused, and often strips off his service greens and his Ottoman-style fez to smoke cigarettes and lounge in the sun. However, what viewers may not realize at first is that these characters are played by real-life twin brothers Elliott and Luke Tittensor (of “House of the Dragon” fame) respectively, imbuing the film’s sardonic goings on with an uncanny quality.

The made-up countries in question don’t seem to matter, which makes for a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows the film’s distinctly English characters to immediately make clear Hudson’s all-encompassing point about how, beyond our most outward and boisterous details, people are all the same, and we should just get along. Politically, “Straight Circle” has a tendency to play like a “Coexist” bumper sticker with all specificities stripped away, until real-world comparisons begin to hurt it. A tale such as this is bound to bring to mind existing equivalents,whether India and Pakistan’s ceremonial Wagah border, or the DMZ between North and South Korea, or numerous ongoing border disputes across the world, which stem from not only social and geopolitical specifics, but a history of western imperialism — and, in some cases, specifically British imperialism. The film’s British production, and its British filmmaker, can’t help but occupy a large section of the movie’s negative space, inviting questions about who and what exactly is being satirized (or perhaps patronized) in this tale of warring desert nations.

However, despite the movie’s gaze verging on orientalist, “Straight Circle” slowly but surely disengages from all forms of reality, and becomes a far more absurd and anthropological study when an incoming dust storm disorients the characters and viewers alike. Beyond a point, both sides of the border become identical, just as the physical and psychological lines between both patrolmen begin to blur, resulting in surprisingly touching drama through personal anecdotes, sprinkled with surrealism, and performed with emotional gusto by its sibling leads, as they dig into what haunts and drives each character. The film is made even more inviting by composer Maxwell Sterling’s rapturous horns, and cinematographer Christopher Ripley’s vivid textures of the parched environment, rooting even the movie’s zaniest happenings in a visceral reality.

The less realistic the movie feels — in a geopolitical sense — the more human it becomes. This is perhaps Hudson’s greatest sleight of hand, and it transforms the initial weaknesses of “Straight Circle” into its most entertaining strengths. No one watching the film is likely to come away with a deeper understanding of military conflict, but there is, eventually, a wonderful psychology to the story, expressed through fleeting flourishes that are sorely missed once they’re cast aside. Perhaps it should’ve been stranger than it already is, but it’s a bold swing to begin with, and marks a fitting first chapter for Hudson, in what is sure to be an interesting career.