Taglines: She had no one to play with for thirty years…
Full Circle movie storyline. Julia Lofting (Mia Farrow), her husband Magnus (Keir Dullea), and their young daughter Kate (Sophie Ward) eat breakfast and Kate starts to choke on a piece of an apple. When the apple refuses to dislodge, Julia reaches for a knife and tries to perform a tracheotomy on Kate’s throat, but fails and Kate bleeds to death.
Distraught by the death of her only child, Julia leaves her husband and moves to a new house; a mysterious old row house in a low part of London. An upstairs room contains a child’s possessions. As she unpacks, Julia finds a mechanical clown toy with sharp, clanking cymbals and accidentally cuts her finger on them.
In a nearby park, Julia thinks she sees Kate, but the girl disappears. She hears strange noises in her house, blaming them on Magnus, who she believes is spying on her. When Julia takes photos of the child’s possessions in the room, she is baffled when there is nothing in the frame of the developed photo and sees that the items cannot be photographed. A radiator in the house mysteriously turns on by itself. Later, Julia sees the girl in the park, but finds a mutilated turtle and a knife where she stood.
Magnus’ sister, Lily, asks Julia if her friends can use her house to conduct a seance. The medium, Mrs. Fludd, explains that spirits need to control someone to carry out physical acts. During the seance, Mrs. Fludd becomes frightened and tells Julia to leave the house immediately. Moments later, one of Lily’s friends, Miss Pinner, falls down the stairs.
While Julia is out, Magnus breaks into her house to find her. He sees something and follows it to the basement, but is killed after falling from the staircase – his throat cut on a broken bottle. A neighbor tells Julia the house once belonged to Heather Rudge, who moved away after her daughter Olivia choked to death (in a similar manner to Kate). Julia visits Mrs. Fludd, who has taken ill since the seance.
She tells the medium she is convinced her house is possessed by Kate’s spirit, but the medium tells her she saw a boy in the park, bleeding to death. When Julia finds an article about a boy, Geoffrey Braden, murdered in the park, she visits Greta Braden, Geoffrey’s mother. Mrs. Braden tells her a vagrant was executed for the crime but that the other children in the park murdered her son.
She says she and her companion have been following the lives of the children, now adults, and asks Julia to visit the remaining two, Captain Paul Winter and David Swift. Winter dismisses her after she says she’s seen Mrs. Braden. Outside she sees Miss Pinner, who denies seeing anything frightening in the house. Julia next visits Swift, an alcoholic, who admits that Olivia had power over him and the other children. She made them each kill an animal, then made them watch as she murdered Geoffrey. He says he told only Mrs. Rudge.
Full Circle is a 1977 British-Canadian supernatural horror film directed by Richard Loncraine, and starring Mia Farrow and Keir Dullea. Based on the novel Julia by Peter Straub, it is the first film realization of one of his books, and follows a woman who, after the death of her daughter, finds herself haunted by the vengeful ghost of a young girl in her new home. In the United States, the film was released under the alternate title The Haunting of Julia in 1981.
Full Circle was shown in San Sebastián International Film Festival on September 12, 1977 and at the Avoriaz Film Festival in France in 1978. The film was shown in London on May 4, 1978 and in Toronto on May 19, 1978. The film was originally released in the UK as Full Circle but fared poorly at the box office. It was released in the United States under the title The Haunting of Julia in 1981, but still failed to find an audience.
Full Circle (1978)
Directed by: Richard Loncraine
Starring: Mia Farrow, Keir Dullea, Tom Conti, Jill Bennett, Robin Gammell, Cathleen Nesbitt, Anna Wing, Edward Hardwicke, Mary Morris, Pauline Jameson, Sophie Ward, Susan Porrett
Screenplay by: Dave Humphries
Production Design by: Brian Morris
Cinematography by: Peter Hannan
Film Editing by: Ron Wisman
Costume Design by: Shuna Harwood
Music by: Colin Towns
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Astral Films (Canada), Cinema International Corporation (United Kingdom)
Release Date: May 4, 1978 (London), May 19, 1978 (Toronto)
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