Disclaimer: This is a review, and as such will contain opinions, spoilers and (often) general shit talking. (If you talk about what you don’t like about a work, you learn a lot. When you think through a work with the stakes presented to you by the creator, by the context of the work, you learn a lot. I review things, not because I love to dislike things, but because dislike contains rich and vital information for the process of experiencing something, but I cannot access it without interrogating it.) So, if you don’t want to have this thing spoiled for you, or don’t know how to behave when a person on the internet, that you don’t know, has opinions that don’t line up with yours, this review is not for you. It’s also not for the author/creator of the work. Please and thank you.
Triangle of Sadness by Ruben Östlund is an intelligent and cutting satire about class disparity, the bubble the super rich live in, and human nature.
It’s divided into three chapters, “Carl & Yaya”, “The Yacht” & “The Island”, each new narrative section taking what went before and scrambling it anew.
We first meet Carl and Yaya.
This is by far my favourite chapter. It has so many iconic scenes in it.
Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Carbli Dean Kriek) have a strained relationship.
They’re both models, and right from the first minutes, we’re treated to the kind of dark humour that I can only call quintessentially Swedish.
The scenes are slow and take their time to build up.
As the audience, we’re left to figure out what this all means as we move through the different areas of a casting call for male models.
The interviewer, making a documentary or some kind of content, strikes that tone of appearing tongue in cheek in the room, yet coming off as condescending but in a ✨fun✨ way, as he moves through the room interviewing the men about getting into a field where they “only earn a third of the women, and constantly have to manoeuvre homosexual men, who want to sleep with you”.
That immediate feel of a meat market, with every model in the room topless, heightens a sense of frivolity and exploitation. I love the scene where Carl is asked whether this brand they’re auditioning for today is a grumpy or smiley brand and then made to model for them in rapid succession.
The slow pan in that scene is absolutely delicious.
This film had me in stitches from the very start.
Once Carl gets into the casting itself, things don’t go any better than outside.
One of the casting directors gives him some walking advice and tells him that “fashion today isn’t just about the surface, it’s about the inside” and asks Carl to relax his “triangle of sadness”. (This is a Swedish term. We call the wrinkles that form between your eyes when you’re stressed the “worry wrinkle”.)
Carl does his best, but both his insecurity, confusion and his frustration are palpable.
He’s got a portfolio of work with large brands, but this changing environment is leaving him feeling distinctly out of place.
This is only heightened when he’s faced with feeling inadequate in his own relationship. While his girlfriend Yaya makes more money out of the two, she prefers to manipulate Carl into paying and taking care of her.
Carl wants to do the right thing, he wants to be a feminist, a modern man, but he doesn’t know how that works exactly. And being in a relationship with a gaslighting narcissist doesn’t help.
Yaya has her own view of the world and is more ruthless than Carl in how she goes about her survival.
Yaya’s introduction scene had me in stitches as much as Carl’s intro did.
The words on the screen flash a deep, serious message that turns more absurd as it goes on.
The audience calms as the lights dim for the start of a fashion show and we hear a heartbeat over a live cellist.
The message starts off strong with “everyone’s equal” (which is rich coming from the fashion industry in the first place) but then flashes “now”, leaving us a little unclear as to what this addition means. Is this how the creators see the world or a hope for the future?
But then it starts sounding a lot more environmental as it flashes “act now”. Then the words “love now” appear on screen but begin ticking like a clock, ramping up the urgency. “There is a new climate entering the world” is the next message, which has us expecting a fashion show that somehow deals with current environmental challenges. But then the message continues with “of fashion” and we’re left raising our eyebrows again.
And then the show really starts.
“Baby! Baby! Baby! Baby!” up on the screen as the models, Yaya at the forefront, come walking down the runway to a strong beat as “cynicism masquerading as optimism” rolls across the screen.
It’s the subtlety in this absurdity that I love.
This is a film in which the creators paid a lot of attention to the details, and there’s a lot more to gain as you watch the scenes again, because I guarantee you miss some things on the first pass.
The fashion show rolls straight into the dinner scene which is just so well done.
The argument between Carl and Yaya is explored and the tension, the awkwardness, is palpable. Östlund talks through the process of shooting this scene in this video and I love his approach to both the scene, the characters and the casting.
As we move into the other sections, Carl and Yaya help carry the narrative through all the way to the end, even when we meet some very memorable characters and have some very memorable moments.
The Captain’s dinner was mental in the best way possible.
Such a visceral scene that only leads into something even worse. I love how to contrast the violence in these sequences, the actual violence is seen from a distance.
Obviously, an explosion isn’t something you can see as a whole up close. It’s just chaos. But to pan out and show us the explosion from afar… ugh, stop it. Just stop! Not only is the set-up classically funny (“Oh look, isn’t this one of ours?”) but the distance also gives weight to how big the explosion really is.
Speaking of the captain, one of the most interesting and entertaining dynamics in the movie is the Marxist Captain (Woody Harrelson) and Russian oligarch (Zlatko Burić) developing an unlikely friendship — through some aggressive drinking and quote flinging.
Through their intense back-and-forth, we get a good look at how the film explores these different and often opposing ideologies, positioning them more like sports teams. And we, the people, choose one team over the other and cheer for that one, rather than trying to figure out how to get it all to work together and get the best of both worlds.
Throughout, the film explores the idea of beauty as a currency and how that measures up against actual currency, as well as the role of human nature in promoting beauty into the status of a currency. While the power dynamics shift drastically during the film, human nature remains the same.
. . . in order to accept the class society we live in, we say that rich people are egoistic and superficial, and poor people are nice and genuine. And I mean the problem is no, you can meet nice individuals in whatever class you are. . . so for me, I don’t consider any of the characters in the film as good, I I always want to try to be able to identify with the actions. And just like in sociology, you can create a setup of a situation when we fail to be good human beings and those situations interest me.
— Ruben Östlund, “Ruben Östlund on Triangle of Sadness and why he wanted to look at ‘beauty as a currency'”
Take the scene in the jacuzzi between the Russian woman and the staff member.
That scene shows how ridiculous customer service standards are.
These are the very same standards the serving crew needed to be super hyped up for by their boss earlier in the film when she told them to say yes to any and every demand the guests make. But then when the request of a guest is so ridiculous, the staff member can’t figure out how to obey her boss’ instructions without breaking protocol.
That scene is so awkward and uncomfortable and so true to how it is working in customer service. Especially, when you’re in service to people who have that mindset that they can buy anything. Once the guest manages to strong-arm the staff member into the jacuzzi, she demands that the whole crew drop everything they’re doing and go swimming.
This, of course, turns out to be a fatal choice as this means the kitchen staff has to leave the food mid-prep and it goes bad, causing the dinner guests to fall ill later in the evening.
This film is like a roller-coaster. One minute you think what it’s saying, and the next all of those assumptions and conclusions are thrown out of the window.
It’s a wickedly funny film that puts privilege and how we, as humans, react to it through the ringer without forgetting to make fun of anyone in any station.
It’s a delight to watch, even on the second and third time, and it just doesn’t get old.
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