Fluentiama Perfect cast and a good story

Libramedi Intense, gripping, stylish and poignant

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Myriam Nys The movie is lifted above the average by a fine performance by Mrs. Farrow, who is deeply moving as a mother devastated by loss and guilt. Her performance turns the movie into a chillingly accurate portrayal of grief and loneliness : here is a woman whose life has turned into a desert, complete with maddening mirages.If one subtracts Mrs. Farrow from the movie, then "Full Circle" becomes a well-crafted horror movie of the more subtle and psychological kind : it's pretty decent, but nothing stratospheric. Its credibility was somewhat undermined by the remarkable ease with which the protagonist succeeded in piecing together a long-buried story of woe : she constantly meets the right people pointing in the right direction, at the right moment. In my experience, people who try to reconstruct old stories, especially old stories involving crime and injustice, are more likely to meet interlocutors threatening to flatten their faces with the aid of a tire iron. And if they do happen upon a benevolent and helpful witness, they'll soon discover that human memory is as riddled with holes as a slice of Swiss cheese. ("Yes, I remember Mrs. Watson from Number 18, she had three sons - no wait, two sons and a daughter, the little daughter had infantile cancer, she died in 1957 or 1960, the poor kid was killed in a car accident, her eldest brother was called Shirley and he became a policeman after his two sisters died in an airplane disaster in the Belgian Congo. Mr. Watson was a criminal - he once tried to kill the Queen with a cauliflower - but Mrs. Watson was a decent Christian woman, she kept all five of her sons on the straight and narrow. Nowadays they all live in Independence Street, with the exception of Pamela Snowdon, who married a Greek astronaut.")Still, it's a pleasure to watch a movie which relies on a careful creation of an uncanny atmosphere, rather than on acres of gore.

fullheadofsteam This movie can better be found under the title "Full Circle". First and foremost, it must be put into perfect perspective: it was released years AFTER the blockbuster "The Exorcist". Such perspective should provide the reasonable expectation of suspense and supernatural horror, and this movie falls so far short as to have deserved the shelving it got -- those reviews that hail it as great and thankfully resurrected from the vaults of overlooked films are off base, because this movie deserved to have been forgotten. Why? First and foremost is the painfully sluggish pace, as it moves so slowly as to border on absolute boredom and disinterest. Second, the unexplainably disengaged characters, most of whom are dispatched (as in killed) with unexplained relationship to, and peculiarly disconnected from the opening sequence and start of the movie. Third, there is really nothing frightening in the movie, just oddity at best. I wasn't scared once, not even once. The brilliant actor Keir Dullea was relegated to a character of no importance and so was completely wasted in this film. Then there is the element of story/script credibility, which comes into question when a character is killed in unoccupied house, after which days and weeks go by with no discerned stench of the dead body. Frightening? Hah! Far from it, and the ending was ultimately anti-climactic, and thereby unsatisfying.

dolly_the_ye-ye_bird What can I say? This is one of those perfect, horror films: No gore and no masked mass murderers...only faded memories of a past murder and a mysterious ghost who wants something. But who that ghost is and just what it wants is kept secret for a good part of the film. Mia Farrow is so good in this type of film. If you thought she was flawless in Rosemary's Baby, you ain't seen nothing yet! She plays a fragile and innocent Julia, who loses her daughter to a choking accident in the first few minutes of the film. We then learn that she and her husband are now separated, presumably because of the stress and tension caused by the loss of the little girl and Julia's short stay in a sanitarium following the tragedy. Julia takes a house in Holland Park and soon begins to sense that there is something in the house with her. Is it the ghost of her daughter or just her soon to be ex trying to push her over the edge so he can have her committed again? Is she really crazy? Or is it something more sinister?

matheusmarchetti The 70's was undoubtedly the heyday for horror cinema, with some well known masterpieces such as Alien, The Exorcist, Suspiria, etc. Still, there were quite a few of them that were just as good, but didn't get the recognition they deserved, and are still quite obscure today. "Full Circle", or as it is better known under it's US title "The Haunting of Julia", is one of these cases. In many ways a hybrid of Nicolas Roeg's "Don't Look Now" and Mario Bava's "Kill Baby ... Kill", is a slow-burning, intelligent horror film that genuinely scares the Hell out of you. Director Richard Loncraine goes for a stylish yet subtle approach at a somewhat old-fashioned ghost story formula, without resorting to 'in your face' scares that were popular at the time. While it does open with a bang and ends with a bang (probably the films' most powerful and haunting sequences), Locraine goes instead for an interesting psychological analysis of a grieving mother's crisis over her daughter's death. Staring with small things that go grow more and more nasty as the story progresses, and the line between fantasy and reality becomes more and more blurry, The events that go on through the film may well be figment of her imagination, and the fact that, by the film's shocking climax, you still don't know for sure if it did happen at all, only adds to it's creepiness and strange atmosphere. It's snail-like pace works both for and against it, as some might find it particularly fascinating and delightfully unnerving, while others might find it dull and uninteresting. In fact, it does move a little too slow for it's own sake, but Mia Farrow's gripping, strong performance and Locraime's visual flourishes help it from becoming uninteresting. Speaking of visuals, the film is beautifully photographed by Peter Hannan, but sadly it does show it's full aesthetic power in the bad VHS print it's available on. Nevertheless, one can still see it's impact on the film, particularly on making the wintry streets of London and the old-dark-house setting even more menacing.The film also benefits from having a lovingly melancholic and often genuinely spooky score by Colin Towns, which blends perfectly with it's visual brilliance, as well as perfectly capturing the characters' emotions. Overall, a sadly unrecognized classic which, in spite of it's few flaws, deserves much more praise. 9/10