Triangle of Sadness (2022)

There's a scene in Triangle of Sadness that I keep coming back to. The luxury yacht is lurching. The ultra-rich passengers are, one by one, losing their composure and their dinner in increasingly grotesque fashion. It goes on far longer than you expect. And then longer still. It's disgusting, it's cartoonish, and it's absolutely the point. Ruben Östlund isn't interested in subtlety here. He wants you to sit in it.

This is a sharp, filthy, darkly hilarious satire that rips into wealth, power, and social hierarchy with genuine gleeful brutality. It follows a cast of ultra-rich influencers, oligarchs, and the assorted yuppie flotsam who drift through their orbit, all aboard a luxury cruise that goes spectacularly, memorably wrong. The question the film keeps circling is a deceptively simple one: who actually holds power when the system that props up status collapses entirely? And the answer, delivered with deadpan relish, is often the person who was scrubbing the toilets.

The film moves in three distinct phases, and it's worth knowing that going in, because the gear changes are dramatic. The first act plants us in the fashion and influencer world, picking apart its vanities and its quietly vicious gender dynamics with real precision. Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean are excellent here, grounded and convincing as a couple negotiating the low-grade power games of modern coupledom, the sort where who pays for dinner carries an enormous amount of freight. Dean, who passed away before the film's wider release, is genuinely wonderful, and there's something bittersweet about watching her work.

Then comes the yacht. Phase two is pure excess, a parade of obscene opulence that exists to be dismantled. The famous dinner scene, with a Marxist captain played with magnificent absurdity by Woody Harrelson trading ideological barbs with a Russian fertiliser oligarch while the boat lists and the guests disintegrate, is the film's chaotic centrepiece. It really is a lot. Prolonged, grotesque, almost cartoonish. But complaining that it goes too far misses the entire argument Östlund is making. Indulgence and rot and the mess beneath the glossy surface: that's the whole film in one extended, nausea-inducing sequence.

The third act strips everything back. Survival territory. No luxury, no hierarchy, no system. And into that vacuum steps Dolly de Leon, utterly magnetic as the ship's cleaner, who quietly and methodically becomes the one person everyone needs. She steals the film completely, and it isn't close. Watching the passengers recalibrate their behaviour, their flattery, their entire sense of self, around someone they would have looked straight through a day earlier is where Triangle of Sadness earns its sharpest laughs and its most uncomfortable silences.

My one reservation is that the film occasionally wallows so enthusiastically in the mess it's criticising that you wonder if it's entirely immune to the same indulgence. Östlund clearly loves the spectacle of decadence even as he's skewering it, and there are moments where the satire feels more interested in its own provocation than in pushing anywhere genuinely new. It's a criticism I'd level more at the middle section than the rest, but it's there.

Still. Bold, fearless, and impossible to ignore. The performances are strong across the board, the structure is genuinely inventive, and the film leaves you with a final image that sits with you. I was reminded a little of Monos (2019), another film that uses a group stripped of civilisation's scaffolding to expose what people really are underneath it, though Östlund is working in a very different register, far more interested in laughs than dread.

Three and a half stars. A savage, messy, frequently brilliant takedown of privilege. Just maybe pack some ginger biscuits.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2025-09-10

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