If he wasn’t a filmmaker, Ruben Östlund might have enjoyed a fine career as a rogue behavioural scientist with a flair for sadism. His films are like covert Milgram experiments levelled at characters all too willing to succumb to cowardice and self-interest. He glories in pouring shame on the weak, most memorably in his 2014 hit, Force Majeure, which hilariously demolished a picture perfect family on a less than perfect holiday in the Alps. In a taped message to the Vancouver Film Critics Circle, who gave it their top prize, Östlund said: “I hope to increase the percentage of divorce in society.” Triangle of Sadness, which could also be called Circle of Abuse, is the writer-director’s most extravagant concoction yet, projecting his vision of self-defeating human frailty into the political realm. This is a blunt film about wealth, privilege, and power, thrillingly cruel and executed with such precision that we can maybe overlook that it’s perhaps a little too blunt. (Cannes did. It was awarded this year’s Palme d’or.)

In its fabulous opening scene, Triangle of Sadness introduces us to nominal lead Carl (Harris Dickinson) as he endures a cattle call for high end male models, immediately making the point that his female counterparts in the industry are awarded a lot more money and prestige—a fact of life relished by Carl’s amoral influencer girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Our two mannequins go for a dinner and an argument over the bill subsequently consumes the entire first act of the film, establishing Östlund’s strategy of absurd overstatement wedded to a gleeful attack on the various isms held dear by the film’s intended audience. Presented in chapters, the second act drops Carl and Yaya onto a luxury cruise liner filled with grotesque caricatures of the super-wealthy, including a slovenly Russian fertilizer mogul (“I sell shit!”) and a geriatric British weapons manufacturer who boasts that his grenades have “protected democracies around the world.” These assholes are afforded every whim and indulgence by an overworked crew managed by the fastidious chief steward Paula (Vicki Berlin), although she’s otherwise busy trying to coax the ship’s shitfaced captain out of his bunk (played by Woody Harrelson, clearly in his element inside this largely European effort.) It’s conceivable that Captain Smith, a devout Marxist, it turns out, has unconsciously engineered the disaster that awaits his vessel, which, once it arrives, provides roughly twenty of the most flamboyantly disgusting minutes of cinema we’ve seen for quite a while, not to mention the most uproarious. It feels like we’re witnessing a collaboration between Monty Python and Marco Ferreri.

The viewer is now trapped with Triangle of Sadness. Punishing capitalist pigs and frivolous aristos is pure wish fulfillment, but the film’s final third is like Lord of the Flies rewritten by a men’s rights activist. It also isn’t—Östlund simply belongs to an anarchic tradition that scandalizes everything and everyone, so we should expect nothing less than a concluding attack on one of liberalism’s most sacred fantasies (matriarchy, in case you’re wondering.) There’s no mercy in this Hobbesian view of humanity, just hierarchies of self-interest inside a perpetual scramble for advantage, conveyed with a vicious wit and cheerful indifference to your politics. A walkout would be received as an ovation.  

Stir, October 2022