A quote from Dante’s Inferno opens The Second Circle, an independent short film directed by, written by and starring Jamie Alvey. More specifically, the film makes reference to the doomed lovers, Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta. It’s a bold, even a lofty epigraph – so what do we have here which rewards this towering literary reference? Firstly, The Second Circle has a strangely evocative, monochrome shooting style, and an opening scene of a woman (Alvey) awakening, covered in blood, to find her lover deceased at her side.
The first impression of the film is – it’s quiet. It fixes on this tragic moment of realisation and it follows the emotional ordeal of the as-yet nameless woman who, perhaps not knowing what else to do, cleans herself up, trying to deal with her predicament. But, things fracture here; the man’s body has disappeared; soon we seem to be looping back to a happier past – the two of them are alive, for starters – though this is interspliced with the woman, again scrubbing her lover’s blood from the floor of the dilapidated house they both apparently occupy. Eventually, through this chopping and changing timeline, we learn that this ill-fated love affair is extramarital; visions and memories cloud together, until it becomes apparent that the fate of Frances and Paul (Cedric Gegel) is inescapable, continually returning them to this moment of reckoning.
Whilst ordinarily narratives don’t present extramarital relationships as the more honourable course, The Second Circle introduces Frances’s husband, too, and presents him as something of a caricature; some of the dialogue surrounding this revelation is a little clunky, as John (Douglas Dean Mitchell) can only fulfil his function as avenging monster, and Frances can only respond to him in similarly simplistic ways, but the film is on far firmer ground in its quieter moments, and a lot of the best aspects of its performances are in the facial expressions of the film’s three actors. There’s real, plausible tenderness between Frances and Paul here. Where the sin of lust in Dante’s depiction of the Second Circle of Hell is punished by whirling storms, the film opts for something much more languid, and it works – particularly within the ever-present budgetary restraints of independent film.
Sensitively filmed, lit and soundtracked, The Second Circle carries its emotional weight carefully, and thankfully without doing a trendy pivot to ‘timeslip horror’ which, in the most egregious cases, gut films of their deeper meaning. Here, this short film is the more engaging for its unswerving focus on its characters and the deeper meanings which the ordeals of two of those characters imply.