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Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in Triangle of Sadness.Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

  • Triangle of Sadness
  • Written and directed by Ruben Ostlund
  • Starring Harris Dickinson, Charlbi Dean and Woody Harrelson
  • Classification R; 150 minutes
  • Opens in Toronto theatres Oct. 7, Vancouver and Montreal Oct. 14, and across Canada Oct. 21

There are movies that are on-the-nose and then there is Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a satire™ that is so pharyngeal that it is the cinematic equivalent of a COVID-19 swab.

Arriving in theatres after capturing the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival this past spring – the second time that Sweden’s Ostlund has won the honour, after his 2017 art-world comedy The SquareTriangle of Sadness will no doubt be greeted as a breath of fresh air for tellin’ it like it is. By which I mean exposing such unspoken truths as: Aren’t those social-media influencers the absolute worst? And what about Russian oligarchs? Ugh, awful! But in setting up and then obliterating such easy targets, Ostlund has created a self-indulgent and lazy screed that mistakes anger for wit, scolding for irony, and vomit (so much vomit) for gags of actual substance.

Splitting his film into three overlong chapters, Ostlund opens his film with what might have been a decent viral video skit dissecting the vanity of the male-model scene that is one shade smarter than Zoolander and two decades too late. It is here we meet Carl (Harris Dickinson), a pretty boy just about to age out of the industry. After losing out on a hot new job, he gets into a prolonged argument with his status-obsessed girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean), who has finagled herself a career chronicling her aspirational lifestyle online.

It is this part of the script, centring on a confrontation between Carl and Yaya in a hotel elevator that stretches itself past stop-and-start awkwardness into something resembling high-squirm comedy, that contains Triangle’s sharpest material. As the young, impossibly attractive couple bicker about the cost of a high-end dinner – including all the transactional elements underpinning the concepts of contemporary courtship – Ostlund reminds his audience that, like in his 2014 breakthrough Force Majeure, the filmmaker is at his best when teasing the thin line between desire and devotion.

Regrettably, Ostlund has other sacred cows to slaughter, and moves on to a middle chapter set aboard a luxury yacht that might as well be an industrial-beef killing floor. Aboard the ship are Carl and Yaya (travelling gratis, in return for Yaya creating a handful of Instagram posts), plus a Cracked Magazine-ready cavalcade of har-dee-har Eurotrash archetypes, including the aforementioned Russian fertilizer magnate (Zlatko Buric), a socially awkward tech billionaire (Henrik Dorson), and an arms manufacturer (Oliver Ford Davies) who longs for the days when society wasn’t so concerned about the legacy of landmines. Playing captain to this band of superrich misfits: a Marxist-spouting drunk played by Woody Harrelson – a too-perfect act of casting that gives Ostlund’s game away. This isn’t satire so much as unintentional self-parody.

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A cruise for the super-rich sinks, leaving survivors trapped on an island in Triangle of Sadness.Courtesy of Elevation Pictures

As Harrelson (his character has a name, but c’mon, it’s basically Captain Woody up there) steers his passengers into choppy waters – and as an outbreak of food poisoning starts to spread across the ship – Ostlund’s film sours with a self-righteous obnoxiousness that is unbearable. Showering his prey with all manner of indignities – from anti-capitalist rhetoric to gallons of bodily fluids – the filmmaker deploys a style of comedy that presumes to punch up without actually realizing it’s smacking itself in the head over and over again. It is a remarkable act of backward-brained buffoonery that would be easy enough to ignore had Cannes not tripped over itself in congratulating its self-congratulatory nothingness.

The less said about the film’s third and final section the better: consider its unofficial title “Power Dynamics for Dummies.” At least Dickinson and Dean weather the ultra-obvious shenanigans well enough, with a touch of unintentional poignancy added to their performances due to the young actress’s death just a few months after Triangle’s Cannes debut.

There is also the slightest bit of amusement to be gained from Ostlund’s ending, which like much of the rather detestable film is meant to land as a sucker-punch but only left me scratching my head. Not in confusion, but because I swear it is lifted from an ancient B-movie that I watched on late-night television decades ago – though for the life of me, I can find no evidence of it existing. Reader, it was such a frustrating experience that I almost threw up.

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