Triangle of Sadness

dir: Ruben Ostlund

2022

I did not care for this film one bit. I’m all for films satirising how terrible wealthy people are, but this flick sets up the limpest of straw targets and then throws up all over them.

It’s also way too long. There is no earthly reason why this needed to be 2 and a half hours long.

Maybe if they’d cut down on the footage of people throwing up or pooping themselves, we could have saved some time.

When it happens, it doesn’t let up for about 15 minutes of CGI emissions, people rolling around on the floor, cameras shaking all over the place. It’s almost like the director wanted the audience to feel sick as well.

That isn’t the film’s biggest failing, for me. The film comes in three generous sections. The first introduces us to a very boring couple, being Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean). They could be the most boring couple ever depicted on a screen. They are both models, which doesn’t help, but they honestly don’t do a single interesting thing. Though they do argue about money. They argue long and hard about money. Carl especially resents that Yaya, which is a terrible name for a model, and a great name for a Greek grandmother, expects him to pay for everything even though she makes way more than he does.

And she is, after all, an influencer. He will take photos of her smiling at pasta, but they never eat pasta. I don’t even know why they go to fancy and pricey restaurants when they clearly eat nothing but steamed chicken breast and maybe a sprig of broccolini? How much would that set you back?

But argue they do, and it’s not an enjoyable or entertaining argument. It’s not that they’re airheads. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. They clearly are empty people trying to navigate a strange world, where their only currency is their looks and how many likes they get online.

But who cares. They end up on a luxury yacht full of ugly but very wealthy people. Instead of being the Rose and Jack of this ill-fated cruise, they’re just two more people that don’t belong in a wealthy paradise of older wealthy people telling service people what to do.

It’s meant to be satire, but it doesn’t really feel that satirical. There are moments of such thudding obviousness that it didn’t even register that these people are objects of satire. There’s an old couple whose fortune was made in hand grenades and land mines. There’s a mega-wealthy Russian oligarch who tells people he got rich selling shit. If that isn’t a dig at Jeffrey Bezos, I don’t know what is.

No, seriously, the ‘Russian’ oligarch, who has both his wife and his mistress on the cruise, is played by Croatian / Danish actor Zlatko Buric. Whenever they want a guy to play a corrupt Russian oligarch, they get this guy. I know him best from the Pusher trilogy, where he plays the most tired of drug dealers, especially in the third film.

He has the goofy hair of one of the Three Stooges, he has the frog-like eyes of Peter Lorre or Marty Feldman, and the heavy, deep voice of the drunk guy at a bar who’s trying to sell you something you never asked to buy.

I kinda hate him, but I kinda love him too. He engages in a trade of commie versus capitalist barbs with the ship’s captain (Woody Harrelson), who is a drunk who hates being captain. That trade of barbs consists of two old guys with spotty memories looking stuff up on their phones to quote to each other.

It is a terrible, lazy scene. Both of these guys can conjure menace, or dark wit, in other contexts, but seem completely incapable of doing so here.

The film just does not call for it. Because of the blanket stupidity of one of the guests, who insists that all the ship’s staff must go down a waterslide for some reason, a kind of domino effect ensues, which results in the seafood served at that night’s dinner being, as they say, “off”. But there’s also a violent storm, so the people who didn’t eat any of the off seafood would be throwing up anyway.

After the interminable scenes of people vomiting or shitting themselves or both, a few survivors find themselves on a seemingly deserted island. But of course because this is cutting edge satire, there’s also a pirate attack for some reason, so that someone can throw a grenade on board, and the dotty woman whose fortune came from arms dealing can say “Darling, isn’t this one of ours?” before she explodes.

On the island…Ah ha! A location ripe for turning the tables! One of the only of the ship’s staff to survive, being Abigail (Dolly de Leon), goes from being the toilet supervisor to being Queen Bee of the island.

And why? Because the two models, the oligarch, some tech guy, and a paraplegic woman have none of the skills required to survive. They are fucking useless. Abigail knows how to fish and start fires, and that makes her, in her own words, The Captain.

And, of course, when poor people rise to positions of power, they end up being just as awful as the rich and powerful. Because all power corrupts.

People who previously touted the general wonderfulness of capitalist exploitation of the disenfranchised masses are now, of course saying that everyone should help everyone else and all for one, one for all, all the usual bullshit.

But The Captain doesn’t care. She has power and she will do anything to hold onto it. When she demands that Carl now warm her bed, he acts like he has no choice, but it’s logical to him that he goes where the power / food is, even as Yaya looks on with incredulity, that she could be thrown over for a middle-aged Filipino maid.

At least they’re not fighting over who’s paying for dinner, eh? It’s him, paying with sex, for food.

How’s that for satire?

Ugh. I cannot convey how much I didn’t enjoy this. This feels like someone came up with the punchline first, and then had to wend their way back to creating a bloated and uneven longform joke to kill a lot of time until the punchline could come. And when it comes, it doesn’t completely land, because the film chooses to leave the very end ambiguous as to what happens in its final moments, as two characters discover something about the island, and one seems to have an incentive to prevent the others from finding that out.

Bleh, I didn’t care by that stage. If we’d cared more about the fate of the central couple, maybe whatever else happening to them would have resonated with me more, but really, I could not have cared less if they’d been eaten by sharks.

It’s an endless parade of ideas being dropped awkwardly into the mouths of stand-ins, delivered unconvincingly, and in a disconnected way. The director really thinks he’s saying something profound, and maybe that’s the biggest surprise of all. That wealthy people can be out of touch with basic reality is a theme so old they even have a phrase from centuries ago that sums up that mentality, in the form of “let them eat cake.”

Triangle of Sadness isn’t even that witty or pithy, and can’t even mock these soft targets with enough ferocity to justify its time on the screen or mine watching it. How can you try to shoot fish in a barrel and still miss?

It’s also sad to note that the South African actor who played part of the model couple, Yaya, or Charlbi Dean as she was known, died just after the film came out. That this is her last performance is even sadder, to go out on such a low note.

I really would have appreciated a scene where she beat Carl to death with a handful of carbs, or something, that would have been great.

The film is aptly named, in that it brought me much sadness, but its shape is something far uglier than a triangle.

5 times it maybe should have been called Trapezoid of Shame instead out of 10

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“No, that's not... You don't understand what I'm trying to say. I mean... we shouldn't just slip into the stereotypical gender roles that everyone else seems to be doing. I want us to be equal.” – you cheap fuck - Triangle of Sadness