Triangle of Sadness (2022)

December 10, 2022 12:47 PM

Social hierarchy is turned upside down, revealing the tawdry relationship between power and beauty. Celebrity model couple, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), are invited on a luxury cruise for the uber-rich, helmed by an unhinged boat captain (Woody Harrelson). What first appeared instagrammable turns into a series of catastrophes.

Written and directed by Ruben Östlund.

70% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.

Now available for digital rental on multiple outlets. JustWatch listing.

posted by DirtyOldTown (18 comments total)

Content warning: positively epic amounts of puke and shit. Rivers of the stuff.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:48 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

Positively wheezing from laughing.

"Who is the captain now? Me. I'm the captain. Before, toilet manager. Now, captain."
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:37 PM on December 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

I haven't seen this yet, but based on the trailer I was like "is this White Lotus Season 2?"
posted by gemutlichkeit at 6:50 PM on December 10, 2022

I watched this yesterday and the Act II is inspired, probably the funniest single segment of any movie in 2022.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 8:20 PM on December 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

Damn, what a movie. Went into it completely cold and it's great. As a treatise on the 1% I think I liked The Menu more, but I 100% loved the ambiguity of this ending.
posted by ssmith at 3:15 PM on December 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

Wow that ending line was a heck of a thing huh

Didn’t know what to expect going in other than Merlin Mann describing it as a Weird Movie for Weirdos and I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it overall
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:54 AM on January 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

This film has three corners and they're all great. But peak puke is the best.

A few random things I noticed:

• The pivotal 'corner' scene happens dead center of the film as the Russian capitalist and American communist chat
• The cover art for the film is also a triangle, with a few horizontal lines thrown in too, like a hierarchical pyramid
• Throughout the film, I kept being reminded of the drama triangle…persecuter - victim - rescuer. Quite a bit of that in the first act especially, with the two characters switching roles in response to each other. But then later with the explicit discussion of roles and power among all of them.
• Loved the use of elevators in the 1st and 3rd acts
• The first scene we see Carl standing, face-forward in a stark black and white room, unable to pull off a convincing walk, in silence. In the last scene we see him side profile, running in broad daylight, blue clothes against bright green trees, panting and grunting in time with super rhythmic music.
• I am not convinced that he's running to Yaya, but rather from something or someone. Has there been a time jump? Is he the rescuer here? Or the victim?

With Triangle and Triangle of Sadness, someone just needs to make another 5-star film called Sadness and my trifecta of perfection will be complete.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:17 AM on January 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

There's a super fucked-up but highly-enjoyable-on-a-certain-wavelength horror film called The Sadness. It's full of the kind of amped-up depravity and violence that makes people shake their heads at horror fans, but it isn't intended to push the limits of endurance or anything, just to make a room full of nerds say "OH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIT!" So weirdly, if you can get on its wavelength... it's... fun??
posted by DirtyOldTown at 12:59 PM on January 5, 2023

man yeah I love the ambiguity of the final shot! Is Carl running to try to find Yaya and Abigail to let them know that they've been saved?
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:46 PM on January 5, 2023

I somehow got the idea that this was a period film that would have a lot of people being constrained by restrictive mores. I have NO IDEA where that impression came from, but this movie was so very much not that that it was like going in blind x 5.

Coming so far out of left field as it did for me, I really enjoyed it. The seasickness/storm scenes reminded me both of Monty Python and of Bunuel's Exterminating Angel.

I also liked The Menu. This movie does a better job of examining power, how it is obtained and how people use and misuse it.
posted by jeoc at 2:04 PM on February 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find myself thinking a lot about this movie and Mrs. Fedora’s observation that it’s just constantly incredibly uncomfortable, including things like the audio environment virtually always having something like a squeaky windshield wiper or a crying baby in the background
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:08 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I found The Menu boring, but I loved this.

I am not convinced that he's running to Yaya, but rather from something or someone. Has there been a time jump? Is he the rescuer here? Or the victim?

My interpretation is that he knows she's going to murder Yaya (I mean, both my partner and I looked at each other when those two went off to hike and said "Well, I guess she's getting murdered, right?") and so this (the threat of Yaya's life) is where Abigail's hold over him breaks - it seemed clear to me in their dialogue that while Carl might get some pleasure from his affair with Abigail, he is only doing this because of the power differential/the food gifts.I suppose it's also possible that he also realizes they are near resorts (the guy selling touristy trinkets), and so this makes him realize he doesn't need to appease Abigail, but I think Carl has just enough of a conscience that he'd be able to 'come to' so-to-speak, without this knowledge.

Some parts that stood out to me:

-It feels like an obvious insight, but it was only from watching this that it occurred to me that influencers are essentially just freelance models (with obviously occasional overlap) - I feel l've seen a lot of reporting on how influencers have changed advertising, but less so on the modeling world.

-I liked that the head of the ship staff (Paula) also gets skewered. The general discourse about labor often oversimplifies things - i.e. there is the professional class, and the working class. What gets less acknowledged is that service industry workers can be elites of a sort - there are waiters and bartenders who easily make six-figures, far more than many professionals could even dream of earning. Obviously, at a cost - nobody is going to deny that Paula is working here - but she is directly benefiting from the super rich in a way that Abigail is not, and her main talent is management and appeasing the wealthy - something that is less important when stranded. (I found parts of this review interesting, but it seems to miss this).

-If they knew they were sailing around islands with potential tourism, why did nobody think of hiking around the island sooner?

-How relaxed everyone seemed about getting on a heavily armed boat. To me this illustrated how privileged people often struggle to realize that they too are mortal, and that their money cannot always save them. Relatedly, Carl's surprise/distress that his comment about the shirtless employee got him sent off the ship - he wants to get his way/have his trivial jealous reaction affirmed, but also doesn't want anyone to get hurt in the process - an impossible duo.
posted by coffeecat at 11:42 AM on February 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't think the illness was seasickness, it seemed the direct result of forcing the staff to stop what their doing, leaving all the seafood out, to take a turn on the waterslide. It was bad seafood that caused those rivers. The captain didn't eat any which is why he didn't get sick. Poor Ludmilla, on the other hand, gorged and geysered. Haven't seen anything like that since Monty Python's Meaning of Life.
posted by Stanczyk at 9:14 AM on March 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I did laugh a bit but mostly found this to be way too long and just way too on-the-nose. I was mostly kind of bored.
posted by octothorpe at 10:25 PM on March 11, 2023

My take on the ending is that it was a flash forward. Abigail came back without Yaya.

Was I just hearing things, or did Abigail also have a gun? When she walked away to take a leak, I thought I distinctly heard telltale handgun noises. So I was surprised when she came back with the rock.

I also must have missed something because I was surprised by the magnitude of the explosion on the yacht. The grenade went off — we see and hear that from a distance. Seconds later, there's a huge explosion.
posted by emelenjr at 3:26 PM on October 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Finally got around to watching this. In comparison to The Menu, they both have their charms, though this felt more like a real movie instead of a stage or tele- play.

There's a lot of extremely unsubtle stuff going on, but there's more subtle things to. Even when it is being unsubtle, at least it is doing it with characters in interesting ways.

The level of cynicism is amusing.

I'd heard about the yacht part, but I don't think I'd heard about the island chapter, and I liked it a lot. Abigail's rise to power was fun and goes wrong of course, but not full of preachy comeuppance. I don't think Abigail would have really killed Yaya, not until she said Yaya could come work as an assistant...

Final shot is interesting. In the moment I took it as a time jump as emelenjr said, but just because I was thinking how does Abigail actually get away with this, how would things go? Carl running too late to save Yaya, probably, makes more sense. And Carl finally learning to run with rhythm like iamkimiam points out...

I will never see EO to complete the donkey-murder trilogy.
posted by fleacircus at 2:21 AM on November 13, 2023

not until she said Yaya could come work as an assistant...
(obs the other way around)
posted by fleacircus at 7:33 AM on November 13, 2023

I really liked this—knew nothing about it going in, just went by the IMDB rating, and was thrilled by the radical shifts along the way; it's like three movies in one. The rivers of puke and shit are hilarious, but its exploration of class relations is the heart of it—I found it more engaging than The Menu (which I did also like) precisely because it didn't hang on some psycho murder plot, it was a portrait of the super rich being brought down to earth by the real world. I loved it too because it didn't stick with the young male model as protaganist; it was far more interesting than that.

Not for the first time, I find myself diametrically opposed in my assessment to Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, who calls it "flabby lite-surrealism" and talks of "tired second-hand satire and cartoony stereotypes". "Everything of interest happens in the first ten minutes," he writes, whereas I was ambivalent about the first ten minutes as I didn't much fancy watching two and a half hours about a model... but it's so much more than that. I'd like to know where Bradshaw has seen stereotypes like the German stroke victim or any of the key rich characters on the yacht, who felt to me like characters we hadn't seen a dozen times before. As did Abigail, and for that matter Yaya, whose arc across the movie was again much more interesting than it seemed it would be. It's so said to hear that Charlbi Dean died of a freak infection and that we won't get to see her again.

Now I've put two and two together on learning that this was by the director of Force Majeure, also a great film, he's absolutely on my one-to-watch list. Now to find and watch the one he made in between them, The Square...
posted by rory at 4:33 AM on September 29