Triangle of Sadness (2022)
★★½ — Triangle of Sadness (2022)
Triangle of Sadness arrived in 2022 trailing considerable awards momentum, having taken the Palme d'Or at Cannes that year, the second time Swedish director Ruben Östlund had claimed the festival's top prize (his 2017 film The Square won the same award). That double-Palme status puts him in rarefied company, and the film itself arrived with the kind of word-of-mouth that tends to split audiences cleanly down the middle: those who found it an exhilarating skewering of the super-wealthy, and those who felt it was overdoing things somewhat. It is, to be fair, a film that is not especially interested in subtlety, and is not trying to be.
The film was produced across an unusually wide co-production spread, with BBC Film among the studios involved alongside 30WEST and Bord Cadre Films, reflecting the kind of pan-European financing model that has become common for ambitious, festival-facing projects. At 147 minutes, it is a generous runtime, and Östlund uses it to structure the story in three distinct sections, each shifting the social terrain beneath the characters' feet. The premise is polished but unremarkable on paper: a celebrity model couple, Carl and Yaya, find themselves on a luxury yacht with an assortment of oligarchs, arms dealers, and social media royalty, until circumstances conspire to strip the whole arrangement of its veneer. What the film does with that premise is considerably more provocative than the log line suggests. Harris Dickinson, who you can also see in my review of The Iron Claw, plays Carl with a quietly reactive energy that suits a character whose confidence is always slightly outrunning his actual leverage. The late Charlbi Dean, in what was indeed her final screen performance, plays Yaya with a cool, performative poise that never quite lets you settle on how calculating she actually is. Woody Harrelson appears as the ship's captain, a Marxist idealist with a fondness for drinking, and Zlatko Burić brings a kind of gleeful, brute cheerfulness to his Russian oligarch. The real revelation, though, is Dolly de Leon, a Filipino actress who had worked steadily in her home industry for years before this role brought her to international attention in a manner that felt, frankly, overdue.
Östlund has always been interested in social embarrassment as a mechanism for exposing deeper anxieties, and Triangle of Sadness sits comfortably alongside that preoccupation. If you enjoy films from the darker end of Scandinavian cinema, the site's reviews of Only God Forgives and Nymphomaniac: Vol. I might also be worth your time, both being other Danish productions that share a taste for discomfort and provocation. Triangle of Sadness is not interested in making its audience comfortable, and it does not particularly care whether you find its more excessive sequences a joke pushed too far or a joke pushed to exactly the right point.
A-Z World Movie Tour Switzerland (apparently?) Triangle of Sadness is a sharp, filthy, and darkly hilarious satire that rips into the absurdities of wealth, power, and social hierarchy with gleeful brutality. Directed by Ruben Östlund, it follows a group of ultra-rich influencers, oligarchs, and yuppies on a luxury cruise that... goes wrong. The film is packed with biting commentary on class, gender roles, and the fragility of status, asking who really holds power when the system collapses. And the answer is... often, the one cleaning the toilets. The first half skewers the fashion and influencer world with deadpan precision, and also tries to completely overtly tackle gender norms, before the film takes a wild turn into survival territory. Phase 2 shows decadence, opulence and excess, and phase 3 is about labour and power dynamics. Dolly de Leon steals the show as the quiet cleaner, and Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean (in her final film role) deliver strong, grounded performances amid the chaos. Yes, the infamous puking scene is a lot, prolonged, grotesque, almost cartoonish in its excess. But it’s also the point: this is a film about indulgence, decay, and the rot beneath luxury. It’s messy, loud, and deliberately uncomfortable. But it’s also smart, fearless, and darkly funny. Bold, provocative, and impossible to ignore. A savage takedown of privilege, even if it occasionally wallows in the mess it’s criticising.
What stays with me, having sat with the film for a while, is how accurately it captures the way status anxiety operates even among people who would consider themselves above it. The fashion world satire in the opening section feels precise rather than cheap, and the survival dynamics of the final act earn their place because Östlund has done enough work in the earlier sections to make us understand exactly what is being dismantled. For me, the casting of Dolly de Leon is not just a strong performance in a vacuum but a structural argument the film is making, one that lands harder than any of the more overtly comedic set pieces. It is the kind of film you end up arguing about afterwards, which is probably the whole idea. And there are worse things a film can do than leave you mid-argument over a second pint.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2022 | Watched: 2025-09-10
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Triangle of Sadness (2022) on YouTube
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Related on Movies With Macca
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More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
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