Triangle of Sadness
Ruben Östlund’s Palme d'Or-winning dark comedy is entertainingly on-the-nose and entirely too long.
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I hadn’t seen Swedish writer/director Ruben Östlund’s best-known films “Force Majeure” (2014) or “The Square” (2017) prior to seeing his latest offering “Triangle of Sadness” (now playing in select theaters including Indianapolis-area venues Landmark Keystone Art Cinema, Living Room Theaters, Kan-Kan Cinema and Brasserie, AMC Indianapolis 17 and AMC Perry Crossing 18) – this, despite having heard a lot (mostly positive) about them.
Having now seen “ToS,” which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Östlund’s second film to do so after “The Square”), my curiosity has certainly been piqued.
The movie is broken into three distinct chapters. The first concerns model/influencer couple Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (late South African actress and model Charlbi Dean) and their quibbles over money. The second concerns the gratis luxury cruise the couple takes and their interactions with the crew and moneyed passengers on board. The third concerns the marooned survivors stuck on an island after the ship sinks during a pirate attack.
Östlund’s film tells its audience time and again over its nearly two and half hour runtime that the wealthy are inherently evil and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. “ToS” is handsomely-made, well-acted, often very funny and occasionally disturbing. Those suffering from coprophobia and/or emetophobia probably need not apply as there’s a 15 to 20 minute sequence of seasick passengers graphically evacuating waste from both ends of their bodies – going so far as to depict the obnoxious Vera (Sunnyi Melles) uncontrollably rolling around in her own mess. (Kudos to the sound, special and visual effects artists for making the diarrheal dire and the vomitous visceral.)
I’d seen and enjoyed Dickinson’s work elsewhere (“The King’s Man,” “See How They Run”), but was especially impressed with his performance here. The young man is movie star handsome and has impressive comedic timing. Dean’s turn is bittersweet as she was lovely and her presence capably commanded the screen. The central couple is strongly supported by Woody Harrelson as the ship’s drunken, inept, Marxist Captain, Zlatco Buric (a veteran of Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Pusher” trilogy) as Dimitry, a Russian manure salesman (he often “charmingly” exclaims, “I sell shit!”), and especially Filipina actress Dolly De Leon as Abigail, a “toilet manager” aboard the boat whose position in life greatly improves upon the island as she’s the only one with any discernible survival skills.
I’ll say this for “ToS,” I greatly preferred it to last year’s Palme d’Or-winning, Neon-distributed October release (“Titane”). It’s also made me curious to check out more of Östlund’s work. Its cliffhanger conclusion annoyed me at first, but it’s also left me thinking ever since. (My read on it is a darker one falling in line with the rest of Östlund’s film.) I do wish Östlund had told his tale with more brevity as it’s essentially saying the same thing Aerosmith’s “Eat the Rich” did in 4:09.