the circle movie review rotten tomatoes

The highlight of “The Circle” is producer-costar Tom Hanks ‘ performance as the CEO of the titular company, a Google- or Apple-styled high-tech octopus that’s spreading its tentacles into every nook of our lives. The brilliance of Hanks’ performance as Eamon Bailey, founder of The Circle, is that it’s not remarkably different from the humble, charming average guy performance he gives as himself whenever he goes on talk shows, accepts awards, or narrates a documentary about the unsung heroes of World War II. For whatever reason, you can’t help trusting Tom Hanks. That’s why “ The Simpsons Movie ” cast him in a voice cameo selling “The New Grand Canyon,” a name for the hole that would have been left in the ground if the military went through with its plan to bomb the recently contaminated town of Springfield into oblivion. “Hello, I’m Tom Hanks,” he says. “The US government has lost its credibility, so it’s borrowing some of mine.”

The notion that Tom Hanks, a patriotic emblem right up there with apple pie and the American flag, would be hired to put a smiley face on an American Hiroshima is scarier than a lot of current horror films. You just know that if he ever used his considerable influence for evil rather than good, almost no one would resist him, and the handful that warned against him would not be believed. And yet Hanks has never played a straight-up bad guy who chills you to the bone whenever he shows up onscreen. The closest he’s gotten to that sort of character was in “The Road to Perdition,” where he played a mob hitman who was more of a morose antihero than a bad guy, and the “ The Ladykillers ,” a slapstick comedy that cast him as an obnoxious, bumbling Satan with a Foghorn Leghorn accent. His performance in “The Circle” as Evil Tom Hanks is the best thing in the picture.

That isn’t saying much. James Ponsoldt’s film based on Dave Eggers’ same-titled 2013 book has a lot of good ideas and a few engrossing sequences, but it never quite finds a groove, or even a mode, and it ends in an abrupt, unsatisfying way. Emma Watson stars as Mae Holland, a young woman who gets a job at The Circle, a cult-like corporation based in the Bay Area that has a campus with man-made lakes and a sky filled with buzzing drones.

You probably have a good idea of where this story is going even if you’ve never read Eggers’ book or seen an anti-tech warning tale before. Mae is handpicked by Eamon and his right-hand man, company co-founder Tom Stenton ( Patton Oswalt ), to take part in an experiment to glorify a new tiny camera they’ve invented. She’ll wear cameras on herself and plant them all over her apartment and in other significant locations of her life and embrace the idea of “total transparency” hyped by her boss. “Transparency” and “integration” and other multi-syllable words get tossed around a lot by guys like Eamon, who are really interested in getting access to our data so they can monitor our lives, sell us new products, and resell our information to third parties. “The Circle” gets this and uses it to generate low-level paranoia in every scene, and amps it up whenever Eamon strides onstage to give one of his TED-talk styled addresses to the company or to unveil a groundbreaking new product (such as the tiny spherical cameras that Eamon distributes all over the world, giving the resultant Orwellian surveillance network a granola-crunching progressive label: SeeChange).

The problem is, “The Circle” never finds a good way to escalate its paranoia in anything other than a tedious, obvious way. And the meat-and-potatoes manner in which Ponsoldt has adapted and directed this material reveals the limits of his talent. A mad visionary stylist who paints with light and sound might’ve made a memorable film out of this story, but that’s not the kind of director Ponsoldt is. He thrives in a low-key mode, telling stories of ordinary people interacting in ordinary spaces; “Off the Black,” “ Smashed ” and especially “ The Spectacular Now ” were about as good as intimate character-driven indies could be, and “ The End of the Tour ” had its moments, too. There’s a Hanks-like decency to the way he looks at human beings. 

But this story doesn’t have many recognizable human beings in it. They’re mostly plot functions with names. Watson’s character is The Heroine, really more of a Gullible Ingenue. Glenne Headley and the late Bill Paxton are The Parents (Paxton shakes visibly because his character has multiple sclerosis). Hanks is the Villain, even though he doesn’t play him that way, and Oswalt’s character is the Scary Right Hand Man, sizing up Mae and pushing her back onto the beaten path whenever she’s about to stray. Ellar Coltrane of “ Boyhood ” plays her ex-boyfriend Mercer, who warns her that The Circle is evil and that she’s selling her privacy and her soul. Karen Gillan is The Friend who hires Mae to work for The Circle, only to become jealous and irritated when the founder selects Mae as the company’s poster girl, then worried when the extent of Eamon’s exploitation becomes apparent.

What I’m describing here is the cast of a horror movie that traffics in archetypal situations, one in which the characters don’t have to be plausible human beings to rivet our attention and merit our sympathy. David Cronenberg and David Lynch , both of whom might’ve done a brilliant job with this same material, are aces at making films fueled by dream logic and filled with archetypal characters and images. (Just imagine what either of them could do with Oswalt, a reliably excellent comic character actor who unexpectedly radiates power and menace here.) Ponsoldt does not appear, on the basis of this film, to be that sort of director, and that sort of director is what “The Circle” needed. This movie might represent the least sensible match of filmmaker and material since Sidney Lumet adapted “ The Wiz .”

As you watch the film, the subdued performances, realistic-looking locations and active-but-not-baroque camerawork make you expect a more realistic film about tech, along the lines of “ The Social Network ” or “ Steve Jobs .” When the story turns into something akin to a nightmarish cousin of “ The Truman Show ” or “ Network ,” or the kid sister of Cronenbeg’s “ExistenZ,” you want it to get bigger, wilder, more outrageous, more frightening, and it’s too nice and reasonable and conscientious to do that. The result feels undernourished in just about every way, although Hanks’s performance, John Boyega’s brief role as a founding programmer, and a couple of frightening action sequences break through the tedium. This is one of those movies that has nothing and everything wrong with it. It’s frustrating in a singular way.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor-at-Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

• John Boyega as Kalden
• Glenne Headly as Mae's Mother
• Nate Corddry as Dan
• Ellar Coltrane as Mercer Medeiros
• Tom Hanks as Eamon Bailey
• Bill Paxton as Mae's Father
• Ellen Wong as Renata
• Poorna Jagannathan as Dr. Jessica Villalobos
• Karen Gillan as Annie Allerton
• Emma Watson as Mae Holland
• Patton Oswalt as Tom Stenton
• Danny Elfman
• Dave Eggers
• James Ponsoldt

Writer (based on the novel by)

• Franklin Peterson
• Lisa Lassek

Cinematographer

• Matthew Libatique

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Rent The Circle on Prime Video, or buy it on Prime Video.

Cast & Crew

Peter Callow

Edward Baker-Duly

Karl Markusson

Sesselia Olafs

Melody Jonsdottir

Griffin Stevens

Joe Streeting

Eva-Marie Kung

Claire Parker

Colin Burnicle

Archie Hickson

'The Circle': A movie review for the tech literate

Is Tom Hanks playing Zuck, @jack or Jobs? "The Circle" serves as a cautionary tale for mainstream audiences but probably won't surprise the tech savvy.

• Three Folio Eddie award wins: 2018 science & technology writing (Cartoon bunnies are hacking your brain), 2021 analysis (Deepfakes' election threat isn't what you'd think) and 2022 culture article (Apple's CODA Takes You Into an Inner World of Sign)

As "The Circle" envisions it, technology's dystopian near-future is already here.

The movie, which opened Friday in the US, imagines a world where the mightiest tech company cajoles us to willingly abandon privacy. As the megacorp embarks on moonshots to promote democracy, protect human rights and provide digital convenience on steroids, a few characters suspect it's covering up sinister motives, like crushing adversaries or accumulating wealth.

No . Freaking . Way .

Don't fault the filmmakers if that revelation feels tame. The objective of a tech thriller shouldn't be an award for peering most presciently into our digital downfall. For mainstream viewers, "The Circle" likely provides an entertaining critique of where tech could take us. But to the tech savvy, many of the movie's dark prognostications feel pretty familiar.

The upside? Tech geeks can still relish playing "Where's Waldo?" for real-life tech references.

Emma Watson plays Mae in "The Circle."

In "The Circle," "Harry Potter" vet Emma Watson plays Mae, a young woman rescued from the drudgery of temp jobs when she's hired at the Circle, the world's most progressive tech company.

After one of the Circle's products saves her life, the company's leader, played by Tom Hanks, recruits Mae for an experimental project. She's the first person to "go transparent," sharing and broadcasting every facet of her life, save for three-minute breaks to the toilet.

Dave Eggers, the author of the 2013 novel on which the movie is based, has trumpeted how little he researched Silicon Valley , but director James Ponsoldt took the opposite approach. He and his crew visited tech campuses and consulted experts to capture the industry's culture.

"It's present-day science fiction," Anthony Bregman, one of the producers of "The Circle," said in an interview on the red carpet for the film's premiere Wednesday night at the Tribeca Film Festival. Just this month, he said, live broadcasts of homicides on Facebook felt eerily true to the world of the movie, in which a character's death is streamed live.

Real-life tech references in the movie aren't meant as veiled accusations.

Hanks' Eamon Bailey, for example, is the company's "public-facing visionary." Earlier this week, Hanks joked with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about playing a diabolical tech genius with a beard. "I played you! I'm not in as good of shape, I didn't exercise or eat as well, but I played you," he said.

These tablets aren't iPads.

But Bailey isn't channeling a single tech figure. He also has the onstage persona of late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (down to employees taking snapshots with aluminum-colored tablets adorned by glowing white logos). Bailey's proclamations about the Circle curing all disease and unlocking human potential could have been cribbed from the News Feed posts of Facebook leader Mark Zuckerberg.

Sometimes the movie uses ambiguity to keep the audience asking questions. In the climax, Mae turns the Circle's facade of transparency against its leaders. In doing so, she pulls a Julian Assange, but the movie leaves it ambiguous whether she is more akin to the Nobel-peace-prize-nominated WikiLeaks circa 2010 or the presidential-campaign-meddling WikiLeaks of 2016.

On the nose

Other actors in the film drew from specific points of reference. Actress Karen Gillan used reports about Amazon to better understand her character, Annie. A longtime friend of Mae, Annie is part of the Circle's executive elite, delivering inhuman productivity.

To get inside Annie's head, Gillan relied on a New York Times 2015 expose about Amazon , she said. That report was criticized by the company and the Times' public editor as unfair, but the portrait of an unforgiving tech giant with intense employee expectations helped Gillan understand Annie's breaking point. "That was quite similar in the Circle, especially with my character, who is on a lot of Adderall all the time just trying to stay awake," she said.

Even when one of the references is on-the-nose, the filmmakers demur. The Circle's campus design, for example, will look familiar to anyone who has seen aerial renderings of the Apple "spaceship" headquarters .

"Whether anybody is accusing Apple of the same ambition [as the Circle], that's not for me to say," Bregman, the producer, said. (Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon didn't respond to messages seeking comment.)

The Circle campus isn't Apple's "spaceship" headquarters. It's just a circle. Get it?

Still, for tech geeks, half the fun of "The Circle" is playing spot-the-tech-reference, such as:

• Mae's Luddite ex-boyfriend, Mercer, turning on his phone to death threats sparked by Mae's naive social-media posting. ( Justine Sacco could relate .)
• "Dream Friday" all-hands meetings that Bailey holds weekly with his Circle workforce. ( The Circle publicly broadcasting some of these meetings would never fly at Facebook .)
• Ingestible biometric sensors. ( Check. )
• Mae's tipsy ride home on a Circle shuttle bus. ( Join me in remembering the Google Bus protests of 2013 .)
• An employee casually mentioning a Circle project to track children via microchips in their bones. ( We're not there yet but close .)
• The Circle's "Group of 40" elite employees. (Apple at least accepts 100 and takes them on a field trip .)

"The Circle" doesn't get everything right. At times, a superficial understanding about the internet -- a criticism of the book -- seeps through to the movie as well. Characters throw out terms like "in the cloud" similar to how your uncle who wears a hip-holster for his phone might. It's smart-sounding tech shorthand but is applied in contexts that don't make precise sense.

Lessons learned?

To our society's credit, when abuse by tech giants comes to light, we generally respond with outrage rather than the indifference of "The Circle." But at the premiere during an audience Q&A, Hanks related his own lesson from the film, while satirizing how we can mock the behavior of movie characters only to live out the same actions ourselves.

"When you see someone on stage in front of a great group of people being incredibly charming, do not trust that man!" he warned. Ever the showman, Hanks strutted back and forth, ironically enacting the exact behavior he railed against.

And the audience ate it up, with laughter and applause.

Batteries Not Included : The CNET team shares experiences that remind us why tech stuff is cool.

CNET Magazine : Check out a sampling of the stories you'll find in CNET's newsstand edition.

The other side of the red carpet: A peek inside the madness

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity. A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity. A woman lands a dream job at a powerful tech company called the Circle, only to uncover an agenda that will affect the lives of all of humanity.

• James Ponsoldt
• Dave Eggers
• Emma Watson
• John Boyega
• 620 User reviews
• 261 Critic reviews
• 43 Metascore
• 4 wins & 1 nomination

Top cast 74

• Beck Bandmate

• (as Nicholas Valensi)

• (as Julian Von Nagel)

• (as Amie McCarthy-Winn)
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Bill Paxton and Glenne Headly , who played the parents of Mae, both died the year of the film's release. Paxton died two months prior to the film's release on February 25 due to complications from heart surgery, and Headly died of a pulmonary embolism on June 8, less than two months after the film's release.
• Goofs When Mercer is being chased by the drone, there is a camera attached to both the driver and passenger window but in one shot on the bridge the driver-side window is rolled down.

[from trailer]

Eamon Bailey : Knowing is good, but knowing everything is better.

• Crazy credits A dedication to Bill Paxton at the closing credits which reads: "For Bill".
• Connections Featured in The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon: John Oliver/Patton Oswalt/Tonight Showbotics/James Arthur (2017)
• Soundtracks Metal Guru Written by Marc Bolan Performed by T. Rex Courtesy of Spirit Music Group o/b/o Spirit Services Holdings, S.A.R.L.

User reviews 620

• May 1, 2017
• How long is The Circle? Powered by Alexa
• April 28, 2017 (United States)
• United Arab Emirates
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official Instagram
• Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California, USA
• Imagenation Abu Dhabi FZ
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $18,000,000 (estimated)
• $20,497,844
• Apr 30, 2017
• $40,656,399

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 50 minutes
• Dolby Digital

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Review: In ‘The Circle,’ Click Here if You Think You’re Being Watched

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By Glenn Kenny

• April 27, 2017

From the drab 1995 cyberthriller “The Net” onward, mainstream American movies have been hard-pressed to pertinently weigh in on the internet and its discontents. Yes, comedies are regularly larded with “old folks can’t tweet” and “these darn kids and their ‘texting’” jokes, while espionage thrillers invariably serve up hot webcam action. But few pictures attempt to take a hard look at what it all means — perhaps because the entertainment business has some resentment about its digital usurpation.

So credit “The Circle” with ambition, at least. This film, directed by James Ponsoldt, is an adaptation of Dave Eggers’s 2013 novel, and the two collaborated on the screenplay. Mr. Eggers’s book is both a satire and a cautionary tale, grafting surveillance-state mechanisms to a faux-progressive vision with pronounced cult leanings — a lot of its “join us” vibe feels passed down from Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” a tale set, like the one here, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mr. Ponsoldt’s movie begins with its heroine, Mae (Emma Watson), trapped in a stale cubicle doing meaningless dunning labor for a meaningless company; in due time, she’s doing much more high-tech “customer experience” work at the Circle, an internet service that seems to meld all the most annoying features of Google, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. Adding to the forced-extroversion fun is a new invention, a multipurpose webcam that’s the relative size and shape of an eyeball. “Knowing is good but knowing everything is better,” crows one of the company’s principals, a Steve Jobs-like visionary named Eamon Bailey (Tom Hanks).

That maxim also appears in the novel, and it sticks in the craw, not least because any first-year graduate student in philosophy could demolish it. At what point did the Circle put a hiring freeze on anyone conversant with epistemology? Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web clichés was arguably part of Mr. Eggers’s point, but much of that point is often muddled in the book. And it’s simply incoherent in the movie. The novel is at its most trenchantly funny when depicting the exhausting nature of virtual social life, and it’s in this area, too, that the movie gets its very few knowing laughs. But it’s plain, not much more than 15 minutes in, that without the story’s paranoid aspects you’re left with a conceptual framework that’s been lapped three times over by the likes of, say, the Joshua Cohen novel “Book of Numbers,” or the HBO comedy series “Silicon Valley.”

Movie Review: 'The Circle'

The times critic glenn kenny reviews “the circle.”.

“The Circle” is based on the Dave Eggers novel of the same name about a woman whose new job at a Google-like company consumes her life. In his review Glenn Kenny writes: Lampooning the simple-mindedness of utopian web-speak is a point that was often muddled in Eggers’s book, and incoherent in the movie. The film was also left with oodles and oodles of bad acting and bad dialogue. Emma Watson’s character spends way too much screen time looking concerned while looking at other screens. Ellar Coltrane can’t find any footing in the role of the Mr. Integrity ex-boyfriend. Tom Hanks lays on an idea of avuncular visionary charm, and doesn’t have much to do beyond that. And John Boyega plays a key character in the book that’s been reconfigured for the movie so that his function makes literally no sense.

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Critical Mass: The Circle a cinematic round of mediocrity

The summer movie season is nearly upon us, but April still has one more Friday to win audiences over. Critics, however, have not come around on Emma Watson's latest, The Circle , which co-stars Tom Hanks as the leader of a shady tech company with nefarious intentions. After a string of high profile underperformers at the domestic box office in recent weeks, EW wants you to make good choices at the movies in the days ahead, so consult our Critical Mass reviews guide below before heading to the multiplex.

Now playing .

EW's Chris Nashawaty says:

It's so obvious that Hanks and his second in command at The Circle (Patton Oswalt, who's ominous character might as well be named Snidely Whiplash) are up to no good that there's nowhere for the film to go with any shred of surprise. Ponsoldt and Eggers are making a satire, but they don't seem to understand that good satire requires a light touch rather than a heavy hand. As Mae gets sucked deeper and deeper into The Circle (more Kool-Aid, please!), she becomes less and less convincing and sympathetic. If we can all see how baldly nefarious The Circle is, why can't she? And if she can't, then why should we care about her? Naturally, there comes a moment in the film when Mae will wake up and see through the lies and all of Eamon's pseudo-compassionate visionary doublespeak. But by then, it's way too late for us to care. The Circle is a movie wrestling with real ideas we should all be concerned about, but it's doing it with one arm tied behind its back. C–

Read the full review here.

Rotten Tomatoes: 22%

Metacritic: 43

Casting JonBenét

Now streaming on Netflix.

It's a fascinating meditation on acting and empathy. What it's not is nonfiction. In fact, at times it feels downright exploitative and prurient — a collection of half-baked, uninformed gossip and speculation. After listening to dozens of these hopefuls explain why they think JonBenét's mother killed her because she wet her bed, or how her young brother did it in a violent accident, or that a local creep did it because he was obsessed with her cotton-candy perfection, you might get the feeling that you're looking at a mirror broken into a thousand little pieces, none of which on its own reflects the truth. A clever filmmaking experiment? Without a doubt. A satisfying one? Not so much. C+

Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

Metacritic: 74

EW's Darren Franich says:

Sleight 's real problem—this could be a spoiler , but it's all anyone seems to be talking about—is that it isn't just a cliché crime film. It's a cliché superhero origin story. Bo's a street magician, but he's also got powers. The nature of those powers are initially mysterious and then splendidly absurd—there's talk of a "feedback oscillator." Given how corporate and one-percent-ish most superhero movies feel, Sleight earns points for grounding its hero in a real-feeling world. But there's a sense of contrivance, too, and as the film becomes more about superpowers, it also loses its particularity, and becomes a weirdly expository melodrama. (" How do I get nine grand by midnight tonight? ") You'd hope that a film like this could put a bold new spin on the superhero story. The reverse is true: Here we are in 2017, and even our nifty low-budget crime movies are building a cinematic universe, and saving the best stuff for the sequel. C

Rotten Tomatoes: 68%

Metacritic: 64

The Fate of the Furious

Now playing.

EW's Leah Greenblatt says:

It wouldn't be a Furious climax if there weren't inordinately expensive moving objects to destroy (in this case, a military submarine), a remarkably one-sided barrage of high-grade weaponry (bad guys, dead; good guys, ricochet!), and an explosive hail-Mary finale so sublimely ridiculous it defies both good sense and gravity. (It helps, perhaps, that several main players have no hair to singe.) The movie ends with more than one literal bang, but the series' fate is hardly sealed; it's merely to be continued: There are two more sequels due by 2021. B

Read the full review here .

Rotten Tomatoes: 66%

Metacritic: 56

The Boss Baby

But there are worst case scenarios, instances where empty cynicism dissolves into sour snark, where the pretense at self-awareness becomes its own retrograde stupidity. Consider the cultural devolution from something like Wicked — a lacerating female-first deconstruction of an old children's story — to Oz, The Great and Powerful , the story of a money-obsessed con man with a heart of gold who gets the good girl by vanquishing all the bad girls. Consider the whole quotemarky "It's just a joke!" tone of online discourse, the rise of smirking insincerity as a political mode and an intellectual dialectic. And then there's The Boss Baby , merely mediocre yet disturbingly familiar, for we are all Boss Babies now. C

Rotten Tomatoes: 53%

Metacritic: 50

Beauty and the Beast

Once in the castle, Belle and Beast both quickly (too quickly) change: He goes from cruel captor to fellow book lover; she goes from fiery inmate to besotted Stockholm Syndrome victim in time for their love to save the day. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman's musical numbers are peppered throughout along with some new ones by Menken and Tim Rice. Like so much about Condon's film, the new songs are perfectly fine, but they're just not transporting. More than movies or theme parks, Disney has always been in the business of selling magic. I wish there was just a little bit more of it in this Beauty and the Beast . B–

Rotten Tomatoes: 71%

Metacritic: 65

Going in Style

Going in Style is, of course, a remake of a 1979 comedy that starred George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg as a trio of old coots who decide to spice up their Geritol years by sticking up a bank in Groucho schnozzes. It's a bittersweet, heartfelt, and very funny movie (go rent it instead of seeing this) mainly because the heist is almost beside the point. It's more about the bedrock friendship between three lonely old men. It's a character movie, not an action movie. And we're always laughing with the characters, not at them and how old they are. In the new version, Joe, Willie, and Albert watch The Bachelorette and get really invested the outcome. They smoke pot with a gangster and get the munchies. They attempt a practice heist on a supermarket and get away on a motorized old-folks scooter. Ann-Margret even pops up as a horny, hot-to-trot grandma to lob lusty innuendos at Arkin. I kept waiting for someone to make a joke about the size of his prostate. Thankfully, it never came. C

Rotten Tomatoes: 45%

Smurfs: The Lost Village

EW's Joey Nolfi says:

For how topical its inclinations are, it's still wrapped in a ridiculous package hand-delivered by cyan humanoids. Absurdity isn't always the mark of simplicity, however. Ambitious films like Inside Out and Zootopia — about personified emotions living inside a girl's brain and a city populated by talking animals — prove sharp wit and kid-friendly appeal don't have to be mutually exclusive. The Lost Village buckles under the pressure of the bar set by far superior titles that have come before it, skimping on narrative nuances in favor of a showy fireworks display that's bound to distract the little ones on a lazy Sunday afternoon, but might leave mommy and daddy blue in the face. C-

Rotten Tomatoes: 37%

Metacritic: 40

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A shrewdly ominous corporate thriller about the death of privacy in the digital age is, at last, a movie that fingers the proper culprits — namely, us.

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“ The Circle ” is a swankly sinister little mind teaser of a thriller. It’s a nightmare vision of what digital culture is turning all of us into, with all of our help. The movie, adapted from Dave Eggers ‘ 2013 novel and directed by James Ponsoldt (“The End of the Tour”), is about a corporation called The Circle that stores massive amounts of data — financial, medical, social, personal — about each of the account holders who belong to it. The company, based in the Bay Area, knows everything there is to know about you — but it’s all for your own convenience! You could call “The Circle” a dystopian thriller, yet it’s not the usual boilerplate sci-fi about grimly abstract oppressors lording it over everyone else. The movie is smarter and creepier than that; it’s a cautionary tale for the age of social-media witch hunts and compulsive oversharing. The fascist digital future the movie imagines is darkly intriguing to contemplate, because one’s main thought about it is how much of that future is already here.

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Mae Holland ( Emma Watson ) is an eager, lively, somewhat unsure-of-herself office drone who is lucky enough, through her friend Annie (Karen Gillan), to snag an entry-level job as a “customer experience” manager on the campus of The Circle. It’s one of those super-energized youth-cult work environments — think Amazon meets Apple meets Facebook — where selling what the company stands for is built into every interaction. Early on, Mae attends her first Dream Friday, the weekly corporate pep rally in which Eamon Bailey ( Tom Hanks ), the company’s co-founder and guru, gets up on stage to point out how everything that’s good for The Circle is good for the world. Hanks, warm and youthful in dark hair and a gray beard, plays Bailey with a disarmingly friendly, Steve Jobs–meets–Tony Robbins happy-talk authoritarian boosterism.

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On Mae’s first Dream Friday, Bailey introduces a shiny round synthetic camera, scarcely bigger than a marble, that can be attached to any surface. A live feed of that environment will then come right onto your computer screen. It’s very NSA — which is to say, nothing we haven’t already contemplated in the age of high surveillance.

But then Mae, after several days on the job, gets visited at her desk by a couple of co-workers, and that’s when the real creepiness starts to play with her head. They tell her that she has already fallen behind on her social media, that she’s not sharing enough with the “community.” She is, they say, the most “mysterious” person at the company (because she’s failed to reveal every last thing about herself). They know that her father (played, in his final role, by the late Bill Paxton) has MS, but didn’t she know that the company offers a support group for children of MS sufferers? They also point out that Mae didn’t come into work over the weekend (but, they hasten to add, that’s okay, it’s not required , though it didn’t go unnoticed), and that she would do well to keep up on her unanswered community work messages, which now number 8,000. It’s all for her own good, of course. It’s so that she can connect .

In nearly every corporate thriller, the ominous bosses are the bad guys, and the workers, with one or two back-stabbing exceptions, are the victims of their malfeasance. “The Circle” presents an altogether different — and more insightful — anatomy of corporate power. Everything The Circle does fulfills a “progressive” agenda. And the bad guys are now us: the proletarian communicators.

At a work party, Mae learns that the company has devised a system to protect children from predators by implanting chips in their bones. When she laughs, in disbelief, that this could be happening, the coworker who tells her about it mentions that it’s “reducing kidnapping, rape, and murder by 99 percent.” (If you object to the idea of implanting chips in children, then it puts you on the side of defending those things.) A politician running for Congress gives a speech to the Circle members, pledging total transparency: She will make every last one of her phone calls and e-mails available. It’s the “liberal” vision of political honesty.

But, of course, what all this is doing is eliminating privacy — and, more than that, downgrading privacy to an archaic concept. “The Circle” is Dave Eggers’ variation on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” in which Big Brother has become the compulsion of ordinary citizens to make public — and relinquish control over — their space, their lives, their selves. How far does the film go into the new consciousness? Far enough to make the principal culprit…the heroine.

Mae is recruited by Bailey and his partner (Patton Oswalt, as the compleat weasel) to become a company advocate, and before long she has embraced the cult of “transparency,” volunteering to wear a micro-camera 24/7 and turn her life into a YouTube-style reality series: “Big Brother” meets “The Truman Show.” (Ponsoldt and Eggers, who co-wrote the script, provide a witty jaded array of pop-up troll comments in on-line bubbles.) Emma Watson makes this convincing, because she gives Mae a desire to be liked that turns her cheerleading for the new technocratic agenda into something uniquely validating. She wins followers, the love of her coworkers, the approval of her bosses — and through it all she fills the hole in her soul with a new way of “connecting.” The company, in turn, gets a new way to control everyone under the sun.

“The Circle” has an elegant and original look, all sleek techno business clutter, and given its star wattage, it’s a good enough movie to find a niche in the marketplace. Watson, who’s at the center of nearly every scene, is a serious actress who proves that she can hold a film together with the force of her personality.

Yet a movie where the heroine, in her ambiguous innocence, goes over to the dark side of corporate power is not necessarily a movie you can warm up to. “The Circle” is a fascinating but chilly parable, a film for the head rather than the heart (or any place lower). It’s a bit of a thesis drama; its driving passion it to warn us about how a surveillance society will work. Mae gets up on stage to demonstrate that anyone on earth can be located in 20 minutes. She starts with a wanted killer (it’s queasy to see even that person readily apprehended), then moves on to her non-techie best friend (Ellar Coltrane, the star of “Boyhood”), whose pursuit by cell-phone camera and highway mini-drone plays like a scene out of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” “The Circle” is so clinical in its paranoia that it doesn’t hit many emotional buttons, but it’s the rare conversation-piece thriller that asks its audience: What sort of society do you really want? The movie shows us what it looks like when people have been convinced to share so much of themselves that they no longer have any selves left.

Reviewed at Tribeca Film Festival, April 26, 2017. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 110 MIN.

• Production: An STX Entertainment release of an Image Nation Abu Dhabi, Likely Story, Playtone, Route One Entertainment prod. Producers: Anthony Bregman, Gary Goetzman, James Ponsoldt. Executive producers: Stefanie Azpiazu, Peter Cron, Evan Hayes, Russell Levine, Federica Sainte-Rose, Ron Schmidt, Steve Shareshian, Marc Shmuger, Sally Willcox.
• Crew: Director: James Ponsoldt. Screenplay: Ponsoldt, Dave Eggers. Camera (color, widescreen): Matthew Libatique. Editors: Lisa Lassek, Franklin Peterson.
• With: Tom Hanks, Emma Watson, John Boyega, Karel Gillan, Ellar Coltrane, Patton Oswalt, Glenne Headly, Bill Paxton.

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