Carl is a male model in a relationship with influencer Yaya, but they argue over who should pay for dinner at a restaurant. They take a yacht trip with other rich guests, but everything there goes wrong. The Captain is drunk; a guest orders the waitresses and cooks to take a swim in the sea; the guests become sick after dinner; a storm and pirates capsize the yacht. The guests are all stranded on an island, but the Filipina cleaning lady Abigail takes charge since she knows how to make fire and catch fish. She persuades Carl to sleep in her bed. When they find out they are on an inhabited island, Abigail wants to hit Yaya with a stone, but Yaya offers her to work for her.
"Triangle of Sadness" is an ambitious, aspirational, but sadly uneven film: the rich upper class is a too obvious target to make fun of, and such scenes of them as throwing up after dinner or the toilet of the yacht spilling over are even more banal means of expressing it. The story has a point: all these rich characters (influencer, supermodel) have skills which are useless in real life, and are thus lost when they have to find food on the island, yet this satire is not that funny. For instance, in one obvious joke, influencer Yaya poses holding pasta on a fork for Carl to make a photo of her on the mobile phone, but after it, she just pushes the pasta on the plate away from herself, explaining to a bewildered guest that she is gluten intolerant. The best joke is when the Captain (Woody Harrelson) and his assistant are leaned for 15 degrees to the right, congruently with the slightly tipped ship, but feign everything is alright as they greet the guests in the dining room. Like Ostlund’s previous film “The Square”, “Triangle” again showcases his trademarks: people arguing over trivialities; the lost existence in modern life; episodic storyline; incomplete ending; autistic direction. All these make for a mixed experience overall. Ostlund achieves the most through allegory: the yacht cruise is the epitome of spoiledness for these rich characters, representing the upper class, while the servants, including the Filipina cleaning lady Abigail, are the lower class, but thngs start changing, shaking the status quo simultaneously with the shaking of the ship during the storm. As the yacht is dissolving, so are the statuses of these characters, when they end up on an island and a twist now makes them the lower class, since they are helpless in their survival skills, while Abigail rises to the top and becomes their new boss, since she knows how to make fire and catch fish. The movie should have explored and elaborated this final segment more, and trimmed down the previous two, since Abigail was underused. As such, "Triangle" is a patchwork with some ideas that stand out, but were not explored more.
Grade:++
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