Triangle of Sadness: Why You Need to Have Faith

This uncomfortable, deeply strange film should have stuck with its narrative momentum.

If you’re going to watch this film, be prepared. It is horrifying. Which is why I love it so.

The moment I saw the exploding toilets in the trailer, I knew I was destined to see Triangle of Sadness¹. I knew it would be a movie I would simultaneously love and hate, and I couldn’t wait.

I’ve never been on a cruise. There was a brief moment when The Duchess and I were very young² when we considered a cruise as a vacation option, but once we looked into it we decided against it. The idea of being trapped in a tiny room and eating ourselves dizzy for a week or more, even spiced with super-managed “excursions” to exotic locations, was almost as terrifying as being forced to eat dinner with strangers every night³. As an older and surprisingly even more cynical man, I can’t even believe we entertained one of those floating dystopias for even a second. I mean, I know people get to just enjoy things, but sweet chocolate christ, cruise ships just seem like floating hells.

I’ve also never been rich, not one day in my life. Oh, I’ve felt rich—one time I found a $50 bill on the street and for a brief moment I imagined myself as a Mr. Monopoly type, monocle and top hat and everything⁴. But I’ve never actually had money—I’m a writer, after all, and you are currently reading this newsletter for free, you selfish bastard, so you do the math on how rich I am⁵.

All of this is to say I was genetically predisposed to love Triangle of Sadness even before I found out it featured Woody Harrelson playing a man having a nervous breakdown of sorts, which is my favorite kind of Woody Harrelson. And the film is interesting—and I mean that sincerely; I’m not using the word “interesting” here the way Southern folk use “bless your heart”—but it suffers from one fatal flaw: It toes the limits of its central sequence and then backs away from the most deranged paths forward.

I Sell Shit

No one plays “exhausted nervous breakdown” like Woody Harrelson.

Triangle of Sadness is divided into three more or less standalone sequences, each rooted by the presence of model and influencer Yaya (Charlbi Dean⁶) and her model boyfriend Carl (Harris Dickinson). It’s easy to make fun of so-called “influencers,” and it is a ridiculous way to make a living, but fuck, man, these folks make good livings influencing—or at least some of them do⁷.

In the first sequence, Yaya and Carl get into an argument about money. The world of fashion modeling is a weird inverse of the rest of the universe—women make a lot more money—and so Yaya is way more successful than Carl, yet she always lets him pay for everything⁸. Carl makes the vital mistake of objecting to this, makes some fumbling (and possibly insincere) attempts to hook it into a rage against traditional gender roles, and they get into one of those epic arguments where you both spend several hours wandering around, miserable and horrified at how delicate and fragile relationships are⁹.

This is an interesting sequence, but not particularly exhilarating. The reason it’s interesting is solely because of the inversion of traditional gender stereotypes—Carl is the one who has to walk around shirtless for an audition¹⁰, Yaya out-earns him big time—but beyond that it’s main purpose is to introduce the two characters. And while director/screenwriter Ruben Östlund finds some depth in these two, they’re not particularly interesting folks. They are pretty people who have totally accepted that they make a living because they are pretty, and they are okay with that¹¹.

When the two make up, admitting to some of their shadier personality traits, the action shifts to a luxury cruise that Yaya has booked for free through her influencer powers. And when I say luxury, I mean, fuck, man—this is the sort of cruise where the staff supervisor (Vicki Berlin) gives an inspirational speech about how every response to a guest request must be “Yes sir! Yes ma’am!¹²” In other words, this is the sort of luxury cruise I will never be allowed on because I would go broke just looking at the ship.

This sequence is the meat of the film and it’s a glorious slow burn. The staff struggles to give the guests everything, the guests are a melange of asshole rich people—a British couple who sell munitions, a Russian ex-apt who “sells shit” in the fertilizer business—and they’re all pretty awful. Their demands are ridiculous, as when one stunningly stupid woman requests that the dirty sails be cleaned, despite the fact that the ship does not, in fact, have sails¹³.

When one ultra-rich guests decides, on a whim, that every staff member on the ship deserves a day of fun and must go for a swim, it disrupts the whole schedule for the Captain’s Dinner, which a quickly-deteriorating captain has postponed until it’s being held on the night of a terrifying storm. The seafood is left out to go bad, the waves turn the ship into a rocking pit of seasickness, and everything inevitably goes wrong. The guests begin to get sick. And then they get sicker. It’s a glorious symphony of horrifying bodily functions as people projectile vomit, shit themselves, and get tossed about by the violent action of the ship like ragdolls—often being rolled around in their own shit and vomit¹⁴.

It just builds and builds, with everything getting worse and worse. The toilets explode. Chaos reigns. It builds and builds until the cleaning staff assembles and to a screeching heavy metal score begins to clean up the shit and vomit on the floors despite the obvious futility of the endeavor. At this point this horrible, no good Captain’s Dinner has reached a peak of chaos and insanity.

And Östlund punts.

On Yacht: Toilet Manager. Here: Captain.

The scene where the topside staff gets psyched up to serve the billionaires is horrifying in its own way. There is no similar scene for the below-deck staff, who perform their work with the clear-eyed doom of people who understand capitalism.

At this point in the story, there’s a choice: You can keep going down the disgusting rabbit hole of life on the ship getting worse and worse, or you can find a way to get off the ship. Östlund chooses to get off the ship, introducing a weird deus ex machina that blows the ships to smithereeens and sends a handful of survivors to a (seemingly) deserted island to fight for survival.

On paper, this makes sense: It offers the chance to hone in on the themes of the story as the rich, pampered folks are revealed to have zero useful skills, the one useful person being Abigail, a housekeeper on the yacht who actually knows how to catch and clean fish, build fires, and other essential skills¹⁵. Once Abigail realizes her power, she ruthlessly exploits it, and once again Carl and Yaya only have their youth and looks to trade for survival.

This final sequence is fine, and works well, and is quite entertaining. But, man, I wanted to stay on the ship. I wanted to see how bad it would get, I wanted to see them dealing with corpses, with an entire ship literally coated in shit and puke. I wanted to see that vision of late-stage capitalism and what things would look like on a ship whose electrical system has been shorted and folks are slipping and sliding in their own refuse as they struggle to survive. The story had developed a fantastic sense of momentum, and the cut to the island sequence stops it cold.

There are a few individual scenes I will watch divorced from their original films or TV shows—self-contained sequences that are just perfect little short films on their own. I’ll add Triangle of Sadness’s middle section to that list. It’s mesmerizing, and nearly perfect. If only the film had stayed with it.

Believe me, if I could make a living by being adorable and pretending to eat pasta on Instagram, I would do it in a heartbeat.

Next week: An often misunderstood song is an ideal soundtrack.

1. As someone who has rolled around in his own viscera after a particularly hair-raising evening of Tequila Fanny Bangers, the scenes of exploding toilets were both a trigger moment and a Manchurian Candidate-style posthypnotic suggestion ordering me to go drink an entire bottle of Jägermeister.

2. This is a moving target. When you’re 21, “very young” means approximately six years old. At this point, “very young” means I was about 43.

3. I always thought becoming an adult with your own money meant not having to eat with other people, but then I’ve been wrong about many things.

4. I can’t be the only person who desperately scans abandoned property lists hoping against hope that I’ve forgotten some Italian villa or SoHo condo I once owned.

5. When I die waiting for a GoFundMe to pay out, you’ll have regrets.

6. Dean passed away at age 32 shortly before the film premiered, which is heartbreaking, as she’s very good here.

7. Hell, I’ve made about $200 worth of free whiskey just by having an online audience of about 200 people. Now imagine what Kim Kardashian makes. SWEET LORD.

8. The Duchess also likes to roleplay “the man will pay” when we go out, but she ruins it by consistently referring to me as “little man” the entire time.

9. I used to live in absolute terror of that moment when you say something that pisses someone off so much they stop speaking to you, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve accepted the near certainty that I die alone and unremarked-upon.

10. For some reason, every time I sell a book I’m also asked to walk around without a shirt for a few hours in the publisher’s office. I’ve never thought to ask why.

11. Me too. Shut up.

12. My typical customer service experience is more “tolerating your bullshit” than “yes sir!” but then I’m a writer, which puts me on the same economic level as indigents and runaway children who failed to save their allowance.

13. Harrelson’s performance here as Captain Thomas Smith is *chef’s kiss*, his expression of mocking hatred as he stares at her is delightful.

14. The secret is to lose consciousness as quickly as possible. Being awake for a hangover of this intensity is a mistake. I’ve said too much.

15. Plus, the mind boggles at how large the Fake Vomit and Fake Shit budget was for this film, so the shift may have been financially necessary.