The secret circle (2011)

It is night, and Cassie is driving home, when an unknown driver overtakes recklessly. Suddenly the girl’s car ends up with a flat tire while the unidentified vehicle, which stopped in the beginning, takes off.

While Cassie is on the phone with her mother Amelia, telling her what happened and reassuring her, something interferes with the connection and the signal dies.

Outside Cassie’s home, a man causes the breaking of the pipes inside the habitation by pouring water from a bottle on the ground. Striking matches in succession, he triggers the fire that will kill Amelia.

The man walks away, letting the house burn.

A month has passed since her mother’s death and Cassie, now an orphan, decides to move to Chance Harbor (WA), where her grandmother Jane lives.

The woman is happy to take her in, and she accommodates her in Amelia’s old room.

Cassie asks her grandmother the reason why Amelia never went to visit her, and Jane replies that it was hard for her daughter to live there due to her husband’s accidental death, occurred soon after Amelia’s birth.

At night, Cassie’s getting ready to go to bed and notices a neighbour watching her. After keeping herself away from the window, she realizes that the previously closed curtains, a measure to keep her far from prying eyes, are still open.

The first day at her new school, Cassie meets principal Dawn Chamberlain, a very helpful woman, a self-declared acquaintance of Amelia who has very special memories of Cassie’s mother.

In the corridors Cassie seems to stir up much attention: a guy, Adam, stares at her insistently, meanwhile two girls, Faye and Melissa, approach her and talk to her in a funny way. Then comes Diana, who labels Faye as the local bad girl. Finally, Diana invites Cassie to the Boathouse diner after classes.

Entering the place, Cassie meets Ethan, one of her mother’s old friends and owner of Boathouse. The man tells her about his love for Amelia, and how the woman chose Cassie’s father over him: their family were “written in the stars”. Ethan is actually Adam’s father.

As soon as Cassie sits down at her table, she’s followed once again by Faye, the principal’s daughter, and Melissa. The young Chamberlain feels great empathy toward Cassie, since she also has grown up without a father, but she embarrasses the girl too by making non-stop comments about Adam. Outraged, Cassie leaves the room.

Once Cassie is in her car, Faye sets her engine on fire just with the power of her eyes, and locks the doors at the same time.

Only thanks to Adam’s intervention Cassie is rescued; the teen is actually able to put the fire out just as easily as Faye started it.

The events leave Cassie in a state of uncertainty; the girl talks to Adam, who tries to calm her down. The guy minimizes his father’s words, blaming them on his alcoholic consumption, then he shares with Cassie his three-year long relationship with Diana.
Diana scolds Faye for her imprudence, but the girlfriend just justifies herself: she didn’t cause the fire in the car, it was Cassie’s power combined to hers fuelling the flames. Faye is now sure that Cassie’s presence in town magnifies the Circle’s inner forces and that they should tell her the truth, but Diana believes they’re rushing things.

In the morning, Cassie finds her grandmother’s message: the woman has gone downtown, so Cassie gets out to look for her with the hope to get some help and finally grasp what’s going on. On her way she meets a man, the same man outside Amelia’s home in the first minutes of the episode: it’s Charles Meade, Diana’s father and Cassie’s mother’s old friend. Soon after Cassie is strolls with Diana and confessing the strange happenings of her first day in town, starting from the accident in her car.

Jane, suspicious of the fire her granddaughter was involved in, goes to see Dawn to make sure the teens aren’t using any kind of witchcraft; the principal assures her: of course they aren’t, being with them every day she would have known!

Diana takes Cassie to a remote house in the woods, where Adam, Faye, Melissa and Cassie’s neighbour, Nick, are awaiting them. The guys show Cassie her real nature: she’s a witch, just like them. Adam tells her it’s a family inheritance started in 1692; Diana points out that every family has got a book, a sort of a diary containing spells, while Melissa maintains that the group has already tried them out but that without the complete Circle, i.e. Cassie, they could do very little. Now the Circle is whole: it’s made up of six people, one from each family, but it’s necessary to recreate a ritual to bound their powers. Cassie is devastated by the revelations and runs away, as the other Circle members follow her to prevent her from letting Jane know everything: the secret must be kept.

Adam succeeds in catching up with Cassie in the woods: he explains the reasons for the secrecy, since their parents before them were all part of the Circle; something apparently went wrong, the deaths of many of them were covered under the carpet and no one was allowed to talk about witchcraft anymore. The teens’ life with only parents testifies that.

Cassie doesn’t believe in witches and magic, so Adam produces evidence: handing Cassie a wet leaf, he claims the she herself will be able to make a drop of water float in the air. When the girl fails, he entwines his hands with Cassie’s and their union makes a multitude of drops rise up all around them. In that incredible scenery Adam nears to kiss her, but Cassie runs off.

The guys of the Circle realize how much their power has increased because of Cassie’s arrival, so Diana is more and more convinced the ritual is mandatory; Adam wanders in search of the new member.

Cassie goes to see Ethan, wanting to know why Amelia left ChanceHarbor. The man argues again his point: their families are aligned with the stars, he and Amelia were destined to be together, just like Cassie and his son Adam. Ethan suggests the girl that fighting her fate would lead to future unfortunate events. The man begins to narrate the story of Cassie’s father, described as a “bad guy”, but the tale is interrupted first by Charles, then by Adam.

Diana reaches Cassie and makes herself clear: sixteen years before their parents, the old members of the Circle, died in an accident. Diana believes firmly it was all a set-up, since something wasn’t quite right with the spells, so the survivors didn’t reveal anything to their children. Diana asserts that the power of the Circle could come in handy for great deeds, but they need to control it through the ritual. Cassie isn’t sure: if her mother had wanted this kind of life for her, she would have told her.

On the dock, Faye wants to test her new enhanced power and causes a storm, but when it gets too violent she freaks out and can’t stop it; the one doing it is Cassie. For the girls this is another proof of her belonging to the Circle, by the way, Cassie doesn’t fall for it.

At Boathouse Charles confronts Ethan: he warns him to keep what he knows to himself, otherwise he will drown him, while he forces the symptoms of a real drowning on Ethan with his magic as he speaks. Charles doesn’t kill Ethan, that is just his final warning.

Adam apologizes to Cassie for the scene in the woods, and both agree not to repeat the experience. The guy finally tells Cassie that now that she’s part of the Circle, she’s no more alone.

Charles reassures Dawn: he took care of Ethan personally. The woman believes Charles did the right thing by bringing Cassie back to ChanceHarbor, however the man is puzzled about the principal’s plan for getting Cassie to do what they expect. Dawn thinks there’s no need to make a move: the Circle itself is going to push the girl to do what they want, without even knowing.

Cassie discovers in her mother’s old room the family diary. Inside the book there is a letter written by Amelia sixteen years before: the woman didn’t want the life she had for her daughter and meant to spare her by keeping her in the dark. Escaping destinies is hard, and Cassie finding the letter means that she has no one left to protect her.
In the end, Amelia writes to her daughter that she has an extraordinary power and someone will come looking for her because of it.

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