05/09/2025 - VENICE 2025: This punkish satire by Oscar Hudson feels so timely it hurts

Politics is a circus in this pretty successful satire shown in Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week – and, well, in real life, too. In Straight Circle, Oscar Hudson, making his feature debut, almost overdoses on split screens and shows something so idiotic that it could actually be true: two neighbouring countries try to co-exist, so close to each other that they can literally hear their respective leaders delivering another bloated speech. But this peace is fragile, and “a ceasefire requires maintenance”. In short, everybody’s on edge.

Fast-forward to two enemies stationed in the middle of nowhere, in the desert, trying to mind their own business while guarding the border but ultimately developing a bond. It’s a familiar trajectory – until they shave one head too many, forget which side of the line they were supposed to be on and descend into sweaty madness. Of course they do – there’s nothing to do and nothing to eat, and one of them has a tendency to shoot at everything that has the misfortune to show up in this hellish place. “That’s how heroes go,” whispers one, but there’s nothing heroic about what they are doing. At all.

There’s always a worry that guys like these will be played in the movies “by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne, or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men”, as it went in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. “And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them.” Not this time. War, or this barely implemented ceasefire, means boredom, awkward violence and boiled eggs. It means a grown man is suddenly chasing a goat.

Hudson, who has a sense of humour as dry as this damned desert, sees all of the absurdity and keeps pointing at it. Would his film make for a better short, as some ideas run around in circles? Maybe. But there’s enough manic energy to make up for any repetition. Not to mention plain weirdness – played by twins Luke and Elliott Tittensor, these two start off like anti-war Lloyd and Harry from Dumb and Dumber, and then their respective identities melt away in the scorching sun. They are different, or so they think at first, tending to their uniforms; then, they are exactly the same. And that is exactly the kind of conclusion that people reach after a war – any war. And then they forget about it all over again.

Straight Circle is a US-UK co-production staged by 2AM, Magna Studios, Such, BBC Films and Helekan Pictures. It is sold internationally by Global Constellation.