Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video for rent or sale
Yaya (Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickinson) on board the yacht bound for trouble
Brace yourself. This movie will begin working your nerves during its opening scenes, turn your stomach through its middle passage, and leave you thoroughly grossed out – though possibly with a rueful smile on your face – by the end.
If you make it that far. Be warned: scalding graphic humor is built into Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s modus operandi. As he exposes the odious idle rich, they become easy to loathe – yet, all things considered, not entirely easy to dismiss.
Östlund clearly believes you’ll recognize a little of yourself in them. Whether his giggly relish makes for actual, insightful fun, each viewer will need to decide.
But genuine satire is infrequent enough in contemporary movies that it’s bracing to come across a takedown that gleefully lunges for the jugular.
It begins by focusing on, who else, shallow pretty people. Young male models line up to be scrutinized by fashion editors as possible camera subjects – not, we readily understand, as people.
These muscled stick toys know they’re auditioning to be used, and with the click of a camera they mechanically turn their faces from giddy to grim and back again.
One robotic dazzler is Carl (Harris Dickinson), who expertly plays the game. On command, he deftly manipulates the small patch of skin between his eyebrows known in the modeling business as the “triangle of sadness”.
It’s where you can fleetingly, when ordered, show a moment’s seriousness within fashion’s frothy otherworld. And maybe where the rest of us live, too.
Also adept at working multiple angles on cue is Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Appearing in the same runway show as Carl, she’s distantly beautiful, better paid than he is, but at the moment broke enough to con him into buying her dinner two nights in a row.
Tricked twice, Carl becomes angry. It’s not about the money, he insists. He wants Yaya to understand that they’re “equal”.
Indeed, during the fashion show where they’ve both just modeled the word EQUALITY has been projected in bold black letters across a red scrim.
Östlund’s script is invidiously injecting that hollow idealistic word under our skins, like an air bubble through a fine, sharp needle.
Without a doubt this is, all in all, a pretty disgusting bunch of humans. But I could never quite cut myself off from most of them. Is this movie a work of deep cynicism or a reminder of the humanity we stubbornly, stupidly keep just out of reach?
The bubble will soon burst. Carl and Yaya win a prize that puts them on board a luxury tourist yacht along with the obscenely wealthy.
These idle rich include Dimitry (Zlatko Buric), a reptilian Russian oligarch who’s gotten rich selling fertilizer.
There’s also a cozy older English couple, with the same first names as the Churchills, Winston and Clementine (Oliver Ford Davies and Amanda Walker), who’ve made their millions selling munitions (one of their company’s hand grenades will surprise later).
Most imperious is bored, bothersome Vera (Sunnyi Melles), who, to amuse herself, orders the entire crew to abandon their duties and join her in a swim in the ocean.
Abashed and subservient, they all do as Vera instructs, despite a clear warning from the ship’s chef. He announces that the time they’ll spend splashing in the water will dangerously delay the evening meal, causing the succulent dishes he’s prepared to spoil.
Sure enough, food poisoning ensues, and with it, abundant projectile vomiting. As the guests and crew cope with the mess, a storm brews, causing the ship to list and take on water, sewage to overflow, bodies to slip and slide in swill. I told you to brace yourself.
Comes the morning and pirates fire on the vessel, causing it to explode and sink, killing most on board. Only a handful of passengers and crew make their way to what seems a desert island.
Here’s where “equality” gets its sharpest test, and Östlund’s humor becomes starkest and most telling.
Abigail (Dolly De Leon), whose job on board was to keep the yacht’s lavatories shipshape, has not only survived the ship’s sinking but managed to wrangle a large plastic lifeboat ashore.
The other crucial staff member who makes it to land is crew boss Paula (Vicki Berlin), who preserves the ship’s hierarchy by looking after the “guests” and issuing sharp orders to the “crew”.
Paula hasn’t grasped that on the island a new order has arisen. Abigail is having none of Paula’s “arrangements”.
The servant class will now be served. Abigail insists that the pecking order on board has been blown to smithereens, and she’ll follow no instructions from Paula.
What’s more, unlike the others, Abigail knows how to fish, and she can secure enough food to keep the survivors alive. Bow down, everyone.
Yaya (Charlbi Dean), Abigail (Dolly De Leon) and Paula (Vicki Berlin) on edge
She announces that she’s the “captain” now. But hierarchies, Östlund’s script gleefully points out, are inherently corruptible, whether ruled from the “top” or, in a sudden reversal, from the “bottom”.
The outcasts continue to quarrel, and Abigail – like so many other leaders – succumbs to the temptation to bully. Even on a small scale, the script suggests, power corrupts.
How did this splenetic orgy of social dysfunction win the Palme D’Or at Cannes as well as score Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay nominations at the upcoming Oscars?
One reason is that it’s superbly rendered. From the insular world of high fashion modeling to the frantic collapse of shipboard order to the Lord of the Flies primitivism on the island, Östlund directs with a steady hand.
His sleek, tumbling style places social ugliness in handsome tableaux and makes the cunning and petty jealousies of the islanders feel like the life force run amok.
The glossy, unforgiving clarity of cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel’s images kept me engrossed for the entire 149-minute run time.
Were these people being photographed with cruelty or, ultimately, with a charity they might not deserve? Wenzel’s darting, gorgeous camera work wouldn’t let me decide.
But the movie isn’t merely good looking. It’s acted with relish and truthfulness by a mutually supportive ensemble.
Abigail (Dolly De Leon) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean) forced to confront darkness together
Dickinson, who at first seems to fight for Carl’s relationship to Yaya, convincingly turns meekly compliant as Abigail regularly beds the hot young model.
Buric, as the slimy, heartless Dimitry, remains magnetically repellent, even when on the island he’s forced to admit that he’s dependent on others.
Dean at first plays Yaya as a teasing temptress but uncovers in her a surprising innocence and vulnerability.
By contrast, Berlin icily reminds us that the middle-manager Paulas of the world never change. From ship to island to wherever Paula will land next, she restores order.
De Leon wittily underplays Abigail’s shift from docile to threatening, as if her refusal to be ordered about when she’s the one keeping everyone alive needs no explanation.
What’s fascinating about Östlund’s writing and direction is his sour but somehow arresting proposition that behaving at our worst doesn’t necessarily signal the defeat of our better angels.
The movie’s ambiguous ending leaves this conundrum up in the air. Have these people sunk to their lowest, or is some sort of salvation closer than they think, if only they’d seek it?
Without a doubt this is, all in all, a pretty disgusting bunch of humans. But I could never quite cut myself off from most of them. Is this movie a work of deep cynicism or a reminder of the humanity we stubbornly, stupidly keep just out of reach?
That’s the question that truly revelatory satire, even at its bitterest, poses. We’re both more and less than we think we are, as we keep hoping, jeopardizing and double-dealing somewhere in the agonizing middle.