Triangle of Sadness Review
Absurdist, entertaining and soul-searching, Triangle of Sadness is a worthy follow-up to Ruben Oestlund’s The Square, even if it doesn’t quite reach that film’s towering heights.
Carl (Harris Dickinson) is a former superstar-level model down on his luck. His girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean) is much more successful, but still expects him to pay for her life. They are invited on a yacht cruise for the rich and powerful, led by a drunkard captain (Woody Harrelson). However, the cruise takes a series of turns for the worse, and after a particularly bad bout of seafood poisoning sweeps through the guests, and a dramatic pirate intervention sinks the ship, Carl and Yaya find themselves trapped on a deserted island with a couple of guests, and some employees. There, they find out what celebrity, money and fame is really worth.
Director Ruben Oestlund had one of the all time great pieces of satirical, out there comedy with The Square. His next film, and winner of the Palme D’Or at Cannes Film Festival, is a similarly out there piece that castrates the influencer generation, obliterates class divides, and screams Viva La ‘Eat The Rich’ at anyone who will listen.
The film is told in three key acts - the first, seeing our heroes Carl and Yaya in their day-to-day life as rich young fashion models, the second on a luxury yacht cruise with other passengers, and the third on a deserted island they get shipwrecked on. Throughout each, we see their status and class change tremendously, noting how surroundings so greatly impact our perception of wealth, status and power. They are in their element originally, and then slightly subjugated on the boat, where they are among the wealthy but have been invited as influencers. When the great leveler occurs, Yaya and Carl find that the deserted island completely obliterates existing norms of wealth, power and strength, and even inverts their own power dynamic as a couple.
Both Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean (who sadly passed away recently) are tremendous in their respective roles. Dean in particularly gives a wonderfully nuanced performance that speaks to a superstar talent that would have become a massive player on the world stage. Woody Harrelson gives a nice drunken slurry of a performance that sways and staggers as much as his capsizing vessel.
Visually, the film inherits a lot of the same cinematographic style as The Square - lots of angles, wide shots, interesting close up choices, and a relatively muted palette. Cinematographer Fredrik Wenzel, who also did The Square, has a way of commanding the camera to convey an unsettling feeling with every shot; everything is a little unbalanced, and prone to collapse.
Ultimately, for me this film only suffers in two areas. The first is runtime - at nearly 2 and a half hours, and paced as it is, the movie drags slightly. The second is the excess with which a particularly seafood-induced sickness scene is dealt with. As a cinema goer, the humor is undoubtedly there, but whereas the rest of the film deals in intriguing and witty humor, the slapstick nature of this scene was just a bit much. And honestly, it made me feel quite ill.
That being said, Triangle of Sadness is a very funny film full of beautiful cinematography, great performances, and a plot that will really make you think.
