This is a true horror movie. Not in the typical Hollywood genre classification system, but more of an interpretive sense. I just want to warn that I haven't read the novel so I can't say if there is a different message given there than was conveyed in this film. But the film fully advocates the total elimination of personal privacy in the quest for advancing the human race. There is no irony in this endeavor which is supposed to drive the audience to think about the scary possibilities of technology. In fact, there is a point in the movie where the invasion of a persons privacy leads to their immediate death and the solution to this is not to step back but to dive deeper and push for the removal of any barriers to public access a person might have. The movie actually ends immediately after this, fading out on a montage of people and places around the world living blissfully under constant supervision.

The movie has several issues with it that might have made it more even keeled as far as the war between transparency and personal privacy is concerned. There are several examples portrayed in the movie where the main character, played by Emma Watson, blatantly has her privacy invaded without her consent, yet she never once questions the morality of it all. Instead she would briefly do a double take, then smile and process the new information with enthusiasm. Some examples:

She's asked to take a physical, whereupon she is required to drink something looking like a protein shake. She's told afterward that there is a sensor she swallowed in the drink which gives her employer, the Circle, full access to her biometrics. They never asked her permission.

She's approached by two members of a "welcoming committee" who pointedly admonish her for not embracing the Circle's social media. Once she agrees to do so, they show her how her involvement in the system correlates to a ranking system of employees. (My personal observation of this is that these sycophants at the Circle are so fully immersed in the culture that the ranking system must have extremely narrow margins between ranks, thus making it practically useless.)

She--and the public--has full access to seeing everything her parents do, including having sex, yet after spending one night thinking about the consequences, immediately returns to trying to access her parents' camera system. Her parents, however, pulled all the cameras and she can't comprehend the reason why.

There's a brief moment where you think she's going to pull some shit and shut down the whole system, and part of it is shown in the trailer, yet she still chugs along toward her goal of zero privacy.

There's a message in this movie which many self-deluded people will take to heart and create a movement which moves toward this goal of total transparency. And that scares me more than any horror movie could.

It almost sounds like the difference between the Circle's surveillance and Skynet is that Skynet was controlled by machines, and no moral choices of what the information would be used for. The movie does sound worthwhile to watch though.