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‘Triangle of Sadness’ Review: Don’t Worry, Be Happy

Ruben Ostlund won the top prize at Cannes for this preening, obvious satire of contemporary hypocrisy.

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By A.O. Scott

I’m tempted to begin this review of Ruben Ostlund’s “ Triangle of Sadness ” by apologizing to Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke for the skepticism , ambivalence and outright frustration I’ve expressed toward some of their films in the past. It’s not that I take any of it back: I still find the tendency in European cinema that those directors represent to traffic frequently in facile provocation and sadomasochistic arousal of the bien-pensant bourgeois audience’s eager self-contempt. But the two of them at least approach the boundless awfulness of the modern metropolitan West with formal rigor and intellectual discipline, and for that reason they have sometimes left me not merely annoyed, but genuinely disturbed , even moved .

Ostlund, who, like Haneke, has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes twice — von Trier only managed it once, for “Dancer in the Dark” — is a different matter. They are influential filmmakers. He is, in the debased social media sense of the word, an influencer. He’s like Clarabell to von Trier’s Pagliacci or the Hamburglar to Haneke’s Professor Moriarty: an amusing enough character, but only if you don’t take him too seriously.

Which may suit him fine. His most recent films — “Force Majeure” and the two Cannes laureates, “The Square” and “Triangle of Sadness” — are best when they’re silliest. But Ostlund’s modest comic skills are tethered to grandiose satirical intentions. “Triangle of Sadness,” in effect a shaggy-dog art-house reboot of “Gilligan’s Island,” has many insights to offer about the shallowness of supermodels, the vulgarity of Russian oligarchs and the brutal inequality of global consumer capitalism.

Among Ostlund’s other startling revelations: water is wet, and excrement stinks. Those two substances are in abundant supply during a storm at sea that buffets a luxury yacht where the models, the oligarch and other characters have been cavorting. During dinner, there’s a lot of vomiting, and then when the toilets back up there’s even more. The resulting mess is what you might call a mixed metaphor, or maybe just a redundant one.

Before the tempest, we have spent some time with Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean), professional hotties who supplement their modeling work with social media self-promotion. We follow them through an awkward dinner date, where Carl wonders why he always picks up the check even though Yaya earns more money. The argument, which Carl pursues with the dogged righteousness of a guy on Twitter asking Serious Questions, demonstrates Ostlund’s refusal to adhere to the corrupt bourgeois notion that brevity is the soul of wit. There is no dead horse he will not beat.

And so we join Carl and Yaya on the yacht, with sundry other sybarites and a staff led by Paula (Vicki Berlin), who occupies a tricky middle position between those who sun themselves on the decks and those who toil below. The wealthy Russian, Dimitry, is there — played with louche, sweaty charisma by the wonderful Zlatko Buric — along with his entourage. Also a sweet old British couple who turn out to be arms dealers. The captain (Woody Harrelson) has taken to his quarters, where he stays drunk until disaster strikes.

When it does, he and Dimitry commandeer the boat’s P.A. system. As the guests cough up their dinner, the two men regurgitate undergraduate-level aperçus about capitalism. The captain is a proud communist — dig the irony! — and he bubbles over with quotes from Karl Marx, Mark Twain, Noam Chomsky and other easily Googled sources of left-wing wisdom. Dimitry, who has some firsthand knowledge of communism and sources of his own, is a good sport about it, but a drunken philosophical argument is often more fun to engage in than to witness. The debate allows Ostlund to lampoon his own intellectualism, which is no deeper than theirs, just less sincere.

The final act takes place on the shores of what seems to be an uncharted desert isle, where the survivors obligingly act out an allegory about power and human nature. This is the best part of the movie, partly because Ostlund allows the characters to behave like people, rather than just grotesque ciphers in his cynical morality play. The performers help, in particular Buric and Dolly de Leon, who plays Abigail, a member of the boat’s cleaning staff who has survival skills that the others lack. As I’ve suggested, we’re closer to “Gilligan’s Island” than to Lina Wertmüller , but that was a pretty good show.

This, in the end, is a very bad movie, executed with enough visual polish and surface cleverness to fool the Cannes jurors, something Ostlund has done twice. Shame on them! But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. The elaborately constructed, meandering plots of “Triangle of Sadness” and “The Square” purport to expose the hypocrisies and contradictions of contemporary life, but they are edifices of complacency, clever advertisements for the status quo.

Triangle of Sadness Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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“Triangle of Sadness,” Reviewed: We’re on a Yacht and We’re Puking

With his sourly playful satire “Triangle of Sadness,” the Swedish director Ruben Östlund shoots fish in a barrel and displays them with an adventurer’s pride. He takes on the easy targets of the obliviously rich and their glamorous entourages and delivers a handful of café-table insights and would-be outrages that seem calculated to the millimetre. It’s a movie of targeted demagogy that pitches its facile political stances to the preconceptions of the art-house audience; far from deepening those ideas or challenging those assumptions, it flatters the like-minded viewership while swaggering with the filmmaker’s presumption of freethinking, subversive audacity. Of course, “Triangle of Sadness” (which opens Friday in theatres) won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize, at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The protagonists are two models, Carl (Harris Dickinson) and Yaya (Charlbi Dean). Their relationship is dominated by fights over money, reflecting their profession’s casual precarity. Carl is introduced at an audition where a dozen or more male models wait around, shirtless, while being prepped by a wrangler who has them pose and emote on command; the models alternate between the cheerful expressions that sell mass-market clothing and the dour ones of high-end designer fashion. Carl’s audition is a torment of superficiality and scrutiny. (The title of the film refers to the lines between his eyebrows, and his prospective employers are heard whispering of Botox.) At a fashion show where he’s a spectator, his disposable spot in the scene’s pecking order is emphasized in a runway-show kerfuffle over seating. It’s in such moments that Östlund’s surest manner is revealed: at his best, he’s a filmmaker of fine points—delicate indicia of poignant humiliations exposing characters to cruel truths about themselves—which he realizes in scenes and images of a clean precision. (The scene that revolves around seating, featuring a long, slow tracking shot, could have been part of a silent film.)

But Östlund’s strongest suit and his strongest inclination are in conflict with each other; his keen observations are submerged in his efforts at social criticism and political philosophy. When Yaya and Carl fight over picking up the check at a fancy restaurant, the extended proceedings discharge their meaning in a pair of quickly delivered lines: Carl says that she makes much more money than he does; Yaya responds that her career is likely shorter, especially if she gets pregnant. The film is sardonic about modelling, but there’s nothing satirical in its view of the business or of the couple’s self-aware place in it. The movie attempts to expands its range with Yaya’s side job as a social-media influencer, which gets the pair a cabin on a yacht cruise for a self-selecting handful of the blithely wealthy, but this plot turn, which takes over the film, prompts Östlund to transform his cast of characters into a sociological cross-section of secondhand types.

The emblem of the cruise is the team of assault-weapon-toting guards who are conspicuously posted on the deck. The belowdecks crews of manual laborers are almost all nonwhite—the cleaning crew comprises mainly Southeast Asian women, and the engine-room workers mostly Black and brown men. As the cruise gets under way, the service staff, a dozen or so young white people in crisp, white-shirted uniforms, meets under the command of the cheerily martial Paula (Vicki Berlin), who exhorts them to say “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, Ma’am,” with hearty enthusiasm, and to never say no to anything—even if a guest is requesting an illicit substance or a “unicorn.” (Unfortunately, this elaborate scene adds little to a similar one , of staffers at a summer hotel-resort, in Busby Berkeley ’s “ Gold Diggers of 1935 ”—complete with its race-based distinctions.)

Not only does “Triangle of Sadness” mock Yaya’s work as an influencer; it sets up Carl and Yaya as frivolous wannabes, even riper for a takedown than the rich with whom they hobnob, because they enjoy the same privileges without selling their souls but merely their images. The hollow simulacra of humans surrounding them on this ship of fools include Dimitry (Zlatko Burić), a Russian oligarch who boasts of selling “shit,” i.e., fertilizer; plus a British arms merchant named Winston (Oliver Ford Davies) and his wife, Clementine (Amanda Walker), who lament the international ban on land mines and its effect on their fortune. There’s also a friendless software creator (Henrik Dorsin) and a haughty woman (Mia Benson) who insists that the ship’s sails need washing. (The ship has no sails.) In a characterization that reveals Östlund’s crass sense of humor, there’s a running joke about a woman named Therese (Iris Berben), who is disabled by a stroke and aphasic, able only to call her husband by name and speak the phrase “ in den Wolken ” (“in the clouds”).

The protagonist of the voyage is the yacht’s captain (Woody Harrelson), an alcoholic who stays locked in his cabin, drunk, blaring a recording of the “Internationale” while reading leftist texts (he declares that he’s not a Communist but a Marxist) and ignoring the entreaties of his crew. The result of his neglect is the scheduling of a formal dinner for all guests on the night of a storm; the ship rocks wildly in the waves, leading to a tragicomic epidemic of seasickness, complete with projectile vomiting and a literal shitstorm erupting from the vessel’s toilets. Spoiler alert: it sounds like more fun than it looks. Östlund may not hesitate to make his characters miserable, but he spares the audience (or, rather, keeps an eye on the box-office), making sure that the excremental scenes stay well short of revulsion; their grossness remains theoretical.

A handful of small-scale scenes deliver quiet but sharp jabs to viewers’ ribs regarding the cavalier display of casual power. Carl, jealous of Yaya’s wink at a shirtless and handsome deckhand (Timoleon Gketsos), salves his pique by lodging a petty complaint to Paula, only to witness the punitive results. Dimitry’s wife, Vera (Sunnyi Melles), making a spectacle of her egalitarian sympathies, tries to reverse roles by ordering a crew member (Alicia Eriksson) to abandon her duties. (The logical conundrum is quick and cutting.) But Östlund’s grandiose sensibility unfortunately dominates the film, both in its political bombast (as in a scene of the captain and Dimitry drinking wildly while trading leaden political witticisms; Dimitry’s rely on the collected works of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher) and in the major pivot that occurs midway through. I won’t spoil this much, except to say that a motley batch of passengers and crew members end up stranded on a deserted island, forced into raw survivalism in a state just above that of nature, where money is useless and power relationships are drastically altered in ways that are utterly unsurprising and commonplace, even if they do lead to a clever trick ending.

Only the fine cast lends life to the movie’s superficial caricatures, even if the hectic, blatant script edges the performances toward the clattery side and Östlund’s precise but stiff direction leaves little room for inventiveness. In particular, Berlin’s rendition of authoritarian cheer and Dolly de Leon’s steadfast assertiveness as a long-suffering staffer leave high-relief impressions. As Clementine, the munitions-maker’s spouse, Walker delivers the best line in the film, with the perfect blithering lilt. Above all, the movie’s cast is shadowed by Charlbi Dean’s death , in August, from a lung infection, at the age of thirty-two. Although “Triangle of Sadness” sticks closer to Carl, the mercurial, elusive Yaya is the dramatic engine of the film, which would be nearly inert without Dean’s labile, coolly impulsive performance. If nothing else, the movie would have assured her stardom; there’s no telling how many characters and films her death foreclosed before their conception. ♦