Triangle of Sadness (2022) Review
7/10
Two influencers take a free berth on a superyacht full of the very rich. The ship sinks. A small group washes up on an island where the only person with survival skills is the woman who cleaned the lavatories. It’s three separate films and announces as much with chapter titles. The first is about a restaurant bill, the second about a boat, the third about power, and they’re of noticeably uneven quality.
I had a good time with this film and I also wanted to shake it. Ostlund can write an argument better than almost anybody working, and then he spends a whole chapter telling me the rich are ridiculous as if I’d missed the memo. The restaurant fight and the island are the film I’d recommend. The yacht is the film I sat through.
Ruben Ostlund won the Palme d’Or for it, his second in five years after The Square. That put him in a very small group of directors to have done that.
The 7 accounts for a film whose satire is extremely obvious for two thirds and whose third act is good. Ostlund has no interest in subtlety and the seasickness sequence runs on far past comfort deliberately. The island section justifies the running time and the first chapter is the sharpest writing.
The Restaurant Bill
The first chapter is a couple arguing about who pays for dinner, and it’s the best writing in the film by some distance. Carl earns less than Yaya and resents that she expects him to pay, and can’t say so without losing the argument on principle. She wants equality and also wants him to offer, and won’t concede that those are in tension. Both of them are right and both are performing.
It runs for something like fifteen minutes across a restaurant, a lift, a taxi and a hotel room, and Ostlund keeps finding new positions for the same disagreement. The taxi sequence, with the driver present and both of them being polite for his benefit, is excellent. What makes it work is that neither position is caricatured. Yaya’s argument about who has been paying across the relationship is correct. Carl’s argument about the gap between stated principle and expected behavior is also correct. Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean are both very good, and Dean died at thirty-two a few months after the Cannes premiere and before the film reached most audiences. That gives the chapter an unintended weight.
It’s almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, and it’s the section I’d show somebody first.
An argument where both parties are right is worth more than one where somebody is wrong, and it’s considerably harder to write because you have to resist the urge to adjudicate.
The construction method is to give each side a real grievance that the other can’t answer. Carl can’t dispute that Yaya has been paid less historically.
Yaya can’t dispute that she expects an offer she claims not to want. Neither argument defeats the other, so the scene has to end without resolution. That’s what real arguments do.
The test is to write the argument and then ask whom you want the reader to side with. If you have an answer, you’ve written a debate with a result, and the reader will feel steered. If you can’t pick, and both characters have said the thing that can’t be answered, the scene will keep working on rereading.
The Yacht and the Vomit
The middle chapter is the one everybody talks about and the weakest of the three.
The passengers are a Russian fertilizer oligarch, an elderly English couple who turn out to manufacture landmines, a tech millionaire, and a stroke victim who can only say one phrase. Each is one joke, delivered repeatedly.
The captain, played by Woody Harrelson, is a drunk Marxist who spends the storm trading quotations over the intercom with the capitalist oligarch while the ship comes apart. That’s the film’s most direct gag and lands about half the time. The dinner sequence during the storm, with the guests eating an elaborate meal as the vessel rolls, runs far longer than comfort allows. It’s not subtle and it’s not meant to be. Ostlund is staging the physical humiliation of people who have arranged their entire lives to avoid it, and length is the technique.
It stops being funny, becomes funny again, then stops. Whether that reads as bold or juvenile is a fair disagreement and I go back and forth on it depending on the day.
What it’s not is an argument. The rich being absurd isn’t news, and two thirds of the film is spent establishing something the audience already agreed with on arrival. That’s my real complaint. I don’t mind the vomit, and Harrelson trading quotations with the oligarch is funny about half the time, but I kept waiting for the chapter to tell me something I didn’t know walking in, and it never does.
The Third Act Is the Film
On the yacht money buys everything. On the island money buys nothing, and Abigail the toilet manager can fish, make fire, and open a bottle.
So she becomes the leader, and the film handles the transition without ceremony. She simply controls the food, states the terms, and everybody accepts them within a day.
Then she becomes something worse. She takes the lifeboat as private quarters, requires Carl to visit her, and trades food for the arrangement. The film is precise that this is what the position produces.
That’s a considerably sharper argument than the first two thirds manage. The rich being ridiculous is a comfortable joke. That the arrangement reproduces itself with any cast at all is an uncomfortable one.
Dolly de Leon is the best thing in the film and the only performance with more than one tone. Abigail is competent, then powerful, then frightened of losing it, and the fear makes the ending work. She’s the reason the 7 isn’t a 6. De Leon makes Abigail’s power feel earned and then makes you watch it curdle, and I believed every stage of it. I’d have happily traded the whole storm for another twenty minutes of her running that island. The final scene, with Abigail holding a rock behind Yaya as they discover a resort just over the hill, is left unresolved, and the ambiguity is the correct choice for once.
If your satire’s target is a system instead of a class of people, you have to show the system surviving a change of personnel, or you’ve written an attack on individuals and disguised it as analysis. Ostlund puts the powerless in charge and lets them behave the same way. That converts a comfortable joke into an uncomfortable argument. The audience arrives happy to laugh at the oligarch and leaves having watched the cleaner do a version of the same thing, and the film never says that this is the point.
Ask whether your critique would still hold if the roles were swapped.
Write the scene where your victim has the power. If they behave better, you believe the problem is those particular people, and you should say so plainly instead of pretending to a structural argument. If they behave the same, you’ve found what the piece is really about, and it belongs in the final act.
Ostlund’s Method
The Square and Force Majeure both work the same way: a single social rule is identified, and the film applies escalating pressure until somebody breaks it in public.
In Force Majeure a man runs from an avalanche and abandons his family, and the entire film is the ensuing dinner conversations. In The Square a curator with impeccable politics behaves badly and spends two hours managing it. The technique is embarrassment as a structural engine, and Ostlund is unusually good at holding a scene past the point where the audience wants to leave. He’s said in interviews that he’s interested in the moment a person’s self-image and behavior separate. That’s why the vomiting works better than it should. It’s a group of people whose entire identity is composure, losing it at the same time, at length, in evening dress. The weakness of the method is that it needs a target with a self-image worth destroying, and the rich are too easy. Force Majeure works better because the man is ordinary and the failure is one anybody could have.
This is the least subtle of the three and the most popular. That’s the usual arrangement.
The Title and What It Means
A triangle of sadness is a real term from cosmetic surgery. It’s the wrinkle between the eyebrows, and the film opens with a casting director telling male models to relax it.
That’s a considerably better title than it appears. The first scene has men being assessed, sorted and instructed to arrange their faces. That’s the same operation the film performs on everybody in it for the next two hours. The audition sequence also establishes the film’s one consistent idea. The casting director explains that expensive brands want models who look miserable and cheap brands want them smiling, because the rich are permitted to be unhappy and the poor are required to be grateful.
Carl is a model whose value is declining with age in an industry that pays women more, which the film states plainly and which is the origin of the restaurant argument. None of this is followed through. The fashion world disappears after twenty minutes and the film never returns to it, which is a loss, because it’s the most specific environment in the picture and Ostlund clearly knows something about it.
What survives is the title, which turns out to describe the whole film: everybody in it is managing their face for somebody with more money.
An opening that establishes your governing idea in a professional setting is worth keeping in play, and abandoning it’s a real cost. The audition scene gives Triangle of Sadness a precise mechanism, that the rich may be unhappy and the poor must be grateful, and the film drops the world that produced it.
The problem is that a strong opening environment sets an expectation about what kind of specificity the book will offer. Twenty minutes of insider detail followed by two hours of general satire reads as a promise withdrawn, and readers tone the drop even when they can’t name it.
Check whether your opening setting reappears. If your first chapter is set somewhere you know intimately and the rest isn’t, either bring that world back at intervals or start somewhere else. The mismatch between an expert opening and a broad middle is among the most common structural faults in ambitious work.
Should you watch Triangle of Sadness?
Yes, with patience. The restaurant argument and the island would deserve a lot more than a 7 on their own, and the yacht drags the average down with a joke I’d already gotten by the time the first course arrived.
If you only have patience for one section, make it the restaurant argument. If the storm wears you out, skip ahead to the island.
